They left the town just as they built it.

And it may well stay that way for the next 500 years.

What are we going to leave behind?

What will be left standing when we're no longer here?

Are cities, are landfills?

What will humanity's legacy be once we're gone?

On the archipelago of Svalbard, floating between Norway and the North Pole, an abandoned

Soviet mining town sits frozen in time and in ice.

It's called pyramid, like the pyramids.

And like the pyramids, scientists believe that this town will be preserved for a long,

long time, thanks to the Arctic climate, a legacy of sorts.

I'm Don Thoris and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible

and wondrous places.

Today, we're visiting this ghost town, out there under the northern lights, way out in

the middle of the Arctic sea.

Who built pyramid and why did they leave?

All of this coming up, but first, some words from our sponsors.

On Svalbard, chances are pretty good you'll run into a reindeer before you find another

person.

Svalbard is an archipelago made up of nine islands and it sits at a kind of crossroads, green

into the west, Russia to the east, Scandinavia to the south, and the vast expanse of the Arctic

ocean to the North.

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