But if these are being already grown in the countries they’re native to, what’s the point in a worldwide seed vault? In the event of natural disaster or civil war destroying crops, the seed vault provides a back-up for the seed banks in that country – and we’ve already seen it prove its worth as a contingency: the Philippines national seed bank was damaged by flooding and then fire, while Afghan and Iraqi banks have been wiped out by wars in those regions. Last year, around 10,000 new varieties of food crop seeds were added to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault from over 100 countries all over the world, bringing the total number of seed samples contained within the vault to over 835,000. The sandstone the vault is set into is low in radiation and stable, plus it’s very cold, so the rooms will remain cold even if the refrigeration units fail.Įach seed sample is preserved inside heat-sealed, four-ply aluminium bags It’s remote, but has good infrastructure and a ready supply of coal to power the facility. Svalbard is an ideal choice for the vault’s location as a kind of fail-safe, should worldwide seed banks fail. This includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation along with a conglomerate of corporations with agricultural interests known as the Global Crop Diversity Trust, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Food on behalf of the Norwegian government. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a giant repository for the world’s seed crops, an effort on the part of several multinational corporations and governments to protect future crop diversity. But this is no safe house for cash or gold, or a financial institution of any kind. The 1,750 banks from around the world, which have made hundreds of thousands of deposits to this vault, can sleep easy knowing their investments are secure. The island’s remote location, just 1,300 kilometres (808 miles) from the North Pole, its inhospitable climate and treacherous terrain make monitoring human activity in the area relatively easy. It’s something you’d half expect to find in a Bond movie: set 120 metres (394 feet) inside a mountain, it’s the site of an old coal mine and boasts some formidable security features that include reinforced concrete walls, dual blast-proof doors, motion sensors and airlocks. Deep within the Arctic Circle, on the frozen island of Spitsbergen in the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago, is a giant vault.
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