The .npz file format is a zipped archive of files named after the variables they contain. The archive is not compressed and each file in the archive contains one variable in .npy format. For a description of the .npy format, see numpy.lib.format.
When opening the saved .npz file with load a NpzFile object is returned. This is a dictionary-like object which can be queried for its list of arrays (with the .files attribute), and for the arrays themselves.