*Genetic diversity – why is it important?* The Svalbard vault was created for moments like this, a global insurance policy to ensure the genetic wealth of agricultural production for the future. ICARDA, an organisation aiming to improve agriculture in dry zones, withdrew samples to duplicate the Aleppo bank as closely, and in February this year, they returned with 15,000 samples to deposit, as a backup of the backup.
One of those cases happened in 2015, when seeds from Syria were retrieved, when their seed vault in Aleppo was shut down as fighting had made it inaccessible. It has earned the nickname \'the doomsday vault\' as it is supposed to preserve earth\'s agricultural diversity in a worst-case scenario. The vault is cooled to -18C, but if the electricity cut, it would take decades before it warmed to zero.Īsmund notes boxes from North and South Korea sit beside one another. But it belies the importance of its contents.įrom all over the world, samples of chickpeas from Morocco, potatoes from Peru and rice from India lie in cold storage, potentially for hundreds of years. The cold hits you as you enter the main chamber, where behind a fence lies a rather ordinary-looking stock room. Two other vaults lie empty, in wait for the thousands more seeds which will be stored in years to come. Asmund Asdal, one of the vault\'s keepers, dreams of playing his saxophone in here due to the dreamy acoustics.īehind the frozen door lies the main vault. Almost completely white and covered in ice crystals, it as where seeds are sorted before being placed in safe storage. Just before you enter the vault stands a room which has been nicknaked \'the cathedral\'.
It was built to last 200 years and to withstand explosions and climate meltdown.
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Locked behind five doors, at 130m above sea level a series of tunnels lead to what some call the most important room in the world. Who knows, maybe these seeds will one day sprout at the North Pole.Svalbard Seed Vault: Built to save humanity from an apocalypseĪ slice of concrete pokes out from a frozen landscape near the North Pole marking the spot where an extensive library of seeds from around the globe hold the genetic keys to human survival. Experts are constantly making new arrangements against the effects of climate change, and the way things are doesn’t change, the situation will not change either. This will result in more warming, and the familiar vicious cycle will continue.ĭesigned to survive for thousands of years without any human intervention, the Doomsday Vault has so far failed to fulfill its goal. By the end of the century, most of the ice cover will turn into mud, resulting in more carbon dioxide and methane release in the meantime. A little control can reduce this to 7☌.īesides acute fluctuations in temperatures, the glacier cover in the fjords decreased considerably, the snow season decreased by 20 days, the rains increased, and the effects of warming can be observed even 80 meters under the surface. Unless carbon emissions are restrained, warming up to another 10 oC is expected by 2100. According to the report recently published by the Norwegian government, Svalbard has already warmed on an average of 5☌ since 1971.
The North Pole is the fastest warming region in the world, and Svalbard, about 1.000 km north of the polar circle, has its share. This way, if any environmental disaster occurs, the seeds are in standby mode, ready to sprout.
Even if there is a power failure, the inside of the vault remains cold. Glaciers serve as a natural insulating material, and the inside is kept at a constant temperature of -18 oC. Since Svalbard has suitable conditions for preserving the seeds with its permanent ice cover, it has been designated as an ideal point for the vault that has a capacity for 2.5 billion seeds. Thus, it is seen as a last resort against the loss of biodiversity caused by agricultural methods carried out on a global scale for the last 50 years. The vault, considered as a security measure against possible environmental disasters, hosts millions of seeds from all over the planet. The seed bank known as the Doomsday Vault is managed by a cooperation of the Norwegian government, the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre and the Corp Trust. However, the problem was dealt with before serious damage occurred. In recent years, the permafrost in the region melted due to extreme temperatures, resulting in flooding of the vault. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Svalbard Islands of Norway is under the threat of global warming.
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