What does archiving Environments do?

Our organization has been using zephyr scale for a while now, so we have some environments that are no longer in use, but were previously. There is an archive button in the configuration for General> Environments but as far as I can tell archiving environments doesn't make any functional change. In a cycle they're all still showing up and selectable, which is kind of the opposite of what I'd expect archiving does. 

Does anyone know how to actually "archive" the environments so that they'll no longer show up as selectable in a test cycle? Or alternately, is that just not possible?