This is pretty rad:
The “Doomsday Vault” is an underground seed bank located 427 feet inside a frozen mountain off a remote island near the Arctic Ocean. It’s prepared to store million of seeds from around the world and received it’s first “deposit” on Tuesday.
The Doomsday Vault is considered a safe haven for the world’s seed collections, protecting them from war, natural disasters, lack of funding, poor agricultural management and extinction.
Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmental and political activist who won the 2004 Nobel peace Prize, placed the first seeds inside the vault, followed by other dignitaries.
The Norwegian government paid 9.4 million dollars to build the vault and it houses 268,000 distinct samples of seeds, with each sample containing over a hundred seeds. The total shipment on Tuesday of 100 million seeds weights about 10 tons, filling 676 boxes.
The Svalbard Seed Vault, as it is officially known, will house up to 4.5 million different seed samples, 2 billion seeds total, including almost every variety of important food crops in the world, according to the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
“The seed vault is the perfect place for keeping seeds safe for centuries,” said Cary Fowler, executive director of the trust. “At these temperatures, seeds for important crops like wheat, barley and peas can last for up to 10,000 years.”
The vault’s location deep inside a mountain between Norway and the North Pole ensures the seeds’ safety no matter what happens outside.
“We believe the design of the facility will ensure that the seeds will stay well-preserved even if such forces as global warming raise temperatures outside the facility,” said Magnus Bredeli Tveiten, project manager for the Norwegian government.
This is not the first seed bank in existence. The Millennium Seed Bank in Sussex, England is part of a scientific project that works with wild plants, and not seeds of crops - which is just as important to preserve.
The idea for the seed bank goes back to the 1980s, but did not come to fruition until the International Treaty of Plant genetic Resources came into play in 2004.
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