In an icy, remote underground fortress that would appeal to even the most discriminating Bond villain, the Norwegian government has taken on a strange project that just may save the human race. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is nestled into a frigid Arctic archipelago 78° north of the Equator, and it aims to collect and preserve seeds from every plant on Earth - a bit like Noah’s Ark, except this time the flooding and devastation would be caused by nuclear warfare or greenhouse gases. Dubbed the “Doomsday Vault,” it officially opened on Feb. 26 and already contains over 100 million seeds. According to the Norwegian government:
The opening of the seed vault is part of an unprecedented effort to protect the planet’s rapidly diminishing biodiversity. The diversity of our crops is essential for food production, yet it is being lost. This “fail-safe” facility, dug deep into the frozen rock of an Arctic mountain, will secure for centuries, or longer, hundreds of millions of seeds representing every important crop variety available in the world today. As well as protecting against the daily loss of diversity, the vault could also prove indispensable for restarting agricultural production at the regional or global level in the wake of a natural or man-made disaster. Contingencies for climate change have been worked into the plan. Even in the worst-case scenarios of global warming, the vault rooms will remain naturally frozen for up to 200 years.
Svalbard’s permafrost, remote location (about 1000 km from the North Pole) and lack of tectonic activity will further protect the vault’s precious stores. From the New York Times:
As of Thursday, thousands of neatly stacked and labeled gray boxes of seeds — peas from Nigeria, corn from Mexico — reside in this glazed cavelike structure, forming a sort of backup hard drive, in case natural disasters or human errors erase the seeds from the outside world.
Descending almost 500 feet under the permafrost, the entrance tunnel to the seed vault is designed to withstand bomb blasts and earthquakes. An automated digital monitoring system controls temperature and provides security akin to a missile silo or Fort Knox. No one person has all the codes for entrance.
Already three-quarters of biodiversity in crops has been lost in the last century, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Eighty percent of maize types that existed in the 1930s are gone, for example. In the United States, 94 percent of peas are no longer grown.
1 response so far ↓
1 Asher Vijay // Mar 8, 2008 at 1:22 pm
That’s so intense that it sounds like an Asimov’s “Foundation”, except that it’s for agriculture and not knowledge.
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