Bahnhof in Stockholm

Buried 100 feet beneath the streets of Stockholm, this old nuclear bunker is the gadfly of all data centers. The US State Department is not very fond of this safe vault location because this facility is owned by the Swedish internet provider Bahnhof. Bahnhof famously shelters the servers for WikiLeaks. Julian Assange’s most precious computers hide in this data bunker. Tucked behind a 1.5-foot steel door and driven by back-up generators that can go for weeks, WikiLeaks will keep breathing as long as it’s here.

Granite Mountain Mormom Vault

The library is buried 600 feet beneath the mountain, where it contains 3.5 billion images from census records to immigration papers stored on microfilm. Granite Mountain is a mass of solid rock one mile up Little Cottonwood Canyon in the Wasatch Range, not far from Salt Lake City of Utah. All these documents were acquired through agreements with archives, libraries, and churches from over 100 countries. Archivists there duplicate and digitize all the old documents. The facility is naturally climate controlled, but they are protected by armed guards and secured with a 14-ton, nuclear-blast-resistant door. Chances are, somewhere inside, there’s a record with your name on it. The digitize documents, have been made public at websites like familysearch.com and ancestry.com.

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the island of Spitsbergen currently houses over 500,000 of the world’s plant species. The vault is 620 miles South of the North Pole and safeguarded by hundreds of miles of ocean. It also sits 430 feet above sea level, safe from any possible sea-level rise. Why go to the expense, why make the effort to secure these seeds in a structure resistant to nuclear war, earthquakes, world war, catastrophic floods and Armageddon. These seeds could certainly be housed at some of the leading agricultural universities around the world or in secured locations in the country of the seeds native origins. It really makes you ask the question, do people know something that the rest of us don't know. If Armageddon happens soon, any hope of bringing the world’s crops back is buried 390 feet under a Nordic mountain. The three seed vaults lay behind four heavy steel doors. As long as the keys aren't hidden under a doormat, our seeds should be safe from Doomsday.

Fort Knox

Plan on breaking into Fort Knox? First, climb the four surrounding fences—two of which are electric—and then sneak past the armed sentinels lining the perimeter. Be sure to avoid the video cameras. Don’t waste time trying to blast through the granite walls—they are four feet thick and held together by 750 tons of reinforcing steel. If you get past the armed guards inside, plus the maze of locked doors, you’ll probably be stopped by the 22-ton vault door. Don’t despair. The vault can be opened, but only if you find all the staff members who know a small slice of the combination (you’ll need all of them, since nobody knows the whole thing.) Once you get inside the vault, you’ll have to break into the smaller vaults tucked inside, then you can start taking the 5000 tons of gold bullion stored in there. And do be careful when you leave: 30,000 soldiers from Fort Knox’s military camp will be anxiously awaiting you outside.

Cheyenne Mountain

The Cheyenne Mountain Complex is a military installation and nuclear bunker located in Colorado Springs, Colorado at the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, which hosts the activities of several tenant units. Cheyenne Mountain complex is where existential threats come not from the Soviet Union but from things like natural disasters, cyber attacks, and amorphous terrorist organizations on the hunt for nuclear weapons, it may today even be considered more important than ever. Among the systems set up to protect the critical operations inside the complex from the most dire attacks are giant, 25-ton blast doors placed deep within the mountain, as well as a tunnel and portal structure designed to deflect a nuclear detonation. There are also a network of blast valves set up to ensure safe air, redundant power generators on top of a huge battery bank, a massive diesel fuel reservoir, a 4.5 million gallon reservoir of water used as a heat sink, a system of giant springs designed to allow the 15 three-story buildings inside the mountain to shift up to an inch in any direction in case of an explosion or earthquake, and countless sections of flexible pipe connectors meant to ensure that significant shaking doesn't upset normal operations.

Federal Reserve Bank of New York

We often hear the words 'Powers That Be' bantered around rather freely but look no further than the Fed. In reality, they are a quasi-secret organization that does not answer to anyone and charges the American people for the use of their own money. Often described by the media as a quasi-government organization nothing could be further from the truth, this is an independent company that is profit driven and has nothing to do with the government other than fulfilling government contracts like many other companies. On top of that they have the final say over who and where banks can be opened in the United States, a great gig if you can get it! Blocks away from the panic of Wall Street, 25% of the world’s gold rests. At New York’s Federal Reserve Bank, over $270 billion of gold bullion hides in a sunken three-story bunker. Most of the gold, however, isn’t American; foreign nations own 98% of the stock. But that’s because they trust the Fed vault. After all, it’s 80 feet below ground, surrounded by solid rock from all sides, and surveyed by a fleet of expert marksmen. And to top it off, the 540,000 bars of gold are locked behind a 90-ton steel door.

Bank of England Gold Vault

It looks like something straight out of Indiana Jones: the UK’s largest gold vault—second in the world to the Fed in New York—stores 4,600 5152 tons of gold. The bombproof door is unlocked via a sophisticated voice recognition system, aided by multiple three-foot-long keys. The bank won’t say how heavy the door is or how deep down the vault is buried, but we do know it has more floor space than London’s Tower 42, a 47-story building.

Iron Mountain

What do the charred remains of Flight 93, the original photo of Einstein sticking out his tongue, and Edison’s patent for the light bulb have in common? They’re all stowed under Iron Mountain.More than 200 feet below the ground, this retired limestone mine houses 1.7 million square feet worth of vaults. The best known Iron Mountain storage facility is a high security storage facility in the former limestone mine at Boyers Pennsylvania in the United States. It began storing records in 1954. It is here that Bill Gates stores his Corbis photographic collection in a refrigerated cave 220 feet (67m) underground. The US government is the biggest tenant, and the identities of 95% of vault owners are confidential. We do know that Warner Brothers, the Smithsonian Institution, and Corbis all have vaults there. Thousands of historic master recordings, photo negatives, and original film reels live here. Iron Mountain is also home to Room 48, a data center backing up some of America’s biggest companies. Two waves of armed guards protect the entrance, and it’s said they inspect guests so thoroughly that even the TSA would be embarrassed.