There’s now an Arctic data vault so our cat videos will be safe after the apocalypse

Look, I don't know what else to tell you: We're getting closer and closer to doomsday and people much smarter than I agree.

In January, the Science and Security Board at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists officially moved the clock to two-and-a-half-minutes to midnight aka two-and-a-half-minutes until, well, doomsday.

But don't worry: way up yonder in the northern reaches of Norway, in the Arctic Circle, there's a new storage unit opening to preserve the world's data in case of some sort of cataclysmic event.

If this sounds a little bit familiar, that's because this new storage unit is related to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway where seeds for tens of thousands of crops are being kept for future need.

That vault, which opened in 2008, is designed to last 1,000 years and withstand a wide range of potential scenarios, including climate change, nuclear war, and even an asteroid strike. It also just got a brand new deposit of seeds in February.

This new unit, the World Arctic Archive, will do the same for data, storing it on a specialized film for safekeeping. This archive has been built in an abandoned coal mine not far from the Seed Vault because preparing for the apocalypse loves company.

According to a brochure from the archive, over 40 nations recognized the area as demilitarized (a result of the Svalbard Treaty) and there's plenty of reason to believe in the assertion everything is pretty safe.

The process of protecting the data is handled by a firm named Piql, which takes your data (let's say, for the sake of argument, the complete run of the Degrassi television franchise on digital video) and is saved both online and physically to piqiFilm, a proprietary film, and stored in a piqiBox for protection for centuries.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Piql founder Rune Bjerkestrand told Live Science that the process of writing the data in multiple layers to the film is "basically big QR codes on films."

Besides that, though, other precautions are taken, including:

• "A neutral, offsite, secure data vault situated on the Svalbard islands in the Arctic sea between Norway and the North Pole"

• "Data securely preserved for 1000+ years on piqlFilm with guaranteed access in the future"

• "Data protected by permafrost in a nuclear- and EMP-safe vault deep inside a closed mine"

• "Redundant high speed data connection to mainland Norway and further to clients in the world for authorised access."

That's ... pretty damn thorough.

Check out the entire brochure below.

Thus far, according to Live Science, Brazil and Mexico have both sent data to be stored there (leaving that hypothetical Degrassi collection unprotected).

There were reports of a Russian military exercise at Svalbard that some suggested could risk the treaty, a good reminder that the area is safe from some sort of invasion only as long as everyone plays it cool.

But if the cataclysmic event turns out to be, say, a zombie apocalypse, we already know that zombies, according to Max Brooks' World War Z, don't do well in frozen conditions, so you can at least feel safe about that.