Bizzare Facts

In the remote Arctic town of **Longyearbyen**, Norway, located on the Svalbard archipelago, there is a law that sounds like a riddle: it is illegal to die. While you won't be arrested for passing away, the town effectively banned death in 1950. The local graveyard was closed to new burials after residents discovered a gruesome problem: the bodies weren't rotting.

Because the town is built on **permafrost** (ground that stays frozen year-round), corpses are preserved rather than decomposed. This preservation is so effective that when scientists exhumed bodies from the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, they found live traces of the virus still intact within the frozen tissue decades later. The graveyard had become a potential biohazard storage facility.

To prevent disease outbreaks and deal with the lack of burial space, the town enacted a policy where terminally ill residents are flown to the Norwegian mainland to spend their final days. If a death does occur in the town, the body is not buried there but is shipped south. It is a place where the environment is so harsh that it denies you even the finality of returning to the earth.