The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is situated more than one hundred metres deep inside the mountain permafrost on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, some 620 miles south of the North Pole deep inside the Arctic circle.
It’s pretty barren.
No trees grow on the archipelago, which is home to some 2,300 people. It was selected because of its inhospitable climate and remoteness. The average winter temperature on Svalbard is around minus 14C. The vault is protected by high walls of fortified concrete, doors armoured with steel plate and a home guard of free-roaming polar bears.
As the world’s first global seed bank, it has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds from all the known varieties of the planet’s main food crops and has been designed as a latter-day Noah’s Ark, or insurance policy, for the planet in the event of a catastrophe such as devastating climate change induced by global warming.
The vault aims to make it possible to re-establish crops and plants should they disappear from their natural environment or be wiped out by major disasters. Cary Fowler, of the Global Crop Diversity Trust which set up the project together with Norway’s Nordic Gene Bank yesterday described the vault as the “perfect place” for seed storage.
The vault is made up of three large, airtight, refrigerated cold-storage chambers which are housed in a long trident-shaped tunnel bored through a layer of permafrost in to a mountain of sandstone and limestone on the archipelago.
Scientists involved in the project point out that some of the world’s biodiversity had already been lost as a result of war or natural disaster with gene vaults disappearing in Iraq and Afghanistan following the conflicts there and while seed banks in the Philippines and Honduras have been wiped out from natural disasters. The vault is the world’s last line of defence against extinction.
‘Every nation has been invited by the Norwegian government to place its seeds in this vault. It’s the last line of defence against extinction for all the crops we have, and the most long-lasting, most futuristic and most positive contribution to humanity being made by the international community today.’
Each country’s seeds will be stored inside heat-sealed, four-ply aluminium envelopes originally designed for use by the military, placed inside sealed boxes, stored on metal shelving and secured inside an air-locked chamber. Each packet will hold one representative crop sample, and about 500 seeds depending on their size. They will remain the property of the country that donated them. This last part is very important as according to researchers at the World Vegetable Centre (I kid you not) in Taiwan, up to 27 “orphan” crops with a value of US$100 billion are grown on 250 million hectares (618 million acres) in developing countries. Orphan crops like cowpea and groundnut are not minor or insignificant crops but are crucial to regional food security.
