It`s been called “Doomsday vault” and by some people, it is seen as humanity’s last hope against extinction after apocalypse or a natural catastrophe. This is not, however, the main aim of the Global Seed Vault in Norway.
Deep in the bowels of an icy mountain on an island above the Arctic Circle between Norway and the North Pole lies a resource of vital importance for the future of humankind. It’s not coal, oil or precious minerals, but seeds.
Millions of these tiny brown specks, from more than 930,000 varieties of food crops, are stored in the Global Seed Vault on Spitsbergen, part of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. It is essentially a huge safety deposit box, holding the world’s largest collection of agricultural biodiversity.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was the brainchild of Cary Fowler, a scientist, conservationist and biodiversity advocate. Though there are more than 1,700 genebanks around the world that keep collections of seeds, they are all vulnerable to war, natural disasters, equipment malfunctions and other problems. In 2003, Fowler started to envision a backup storage facility where all of the world’s seeds could be stored as safely as possible.
In 2008, Fowler’s idea was realized and the Global Seed Vault was built, carved nearly 500 feet (152 meters) into the side of a mountain. In 2015, the Syrian war brought the first withdrawal from the seed vault. The seeds replaced those damaged in a gene bank (a facility that stores genetic material) near the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo. In 2016, Fowler released a book on the vault called “Seeds on Ice: Svalbard and the Global Seed Vault.”
The seeds are kept at a temperature at 0 F, are sealed in three-ply foil packages and then sealed inside boxes. These boxes are placed on shelves inside the vault where temperature and moisture levels are closely monitored. This process helps keep the metabolic activity in the seeds low, keeping them viable for long periods of time.
The seeds lying in the deep freeze of the vault include wild and old varieties, many of which are not in general use anymore. And many don’t exist outside of the seed collections they came from. But the genetic diversity contained in the vault could provide the DNA traits needed to develop new strains for whatever challenges the world or a particular region will face in the future. One of the 200,000 varieties of rice within the vault could have the trait needed to adapt rice to higher temperatures, for example, or to find resistance to a new pest or disease. This is particularly important with the challenges of climate change.
Sources: Time, Live Science
