On Monday, gene banks from Sudan, Uganda, New Zealand, Germany and Lebanon will deposit seeds, including millet, sorghum and wheat, as back-ups to their own collections. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, on Spitsbergen island halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, is only opened a few times a year to limit its seed banks' exposure to the outside world. This article was originally published by Business Insider.OSLO: A vault built on an Arctic mountainside to preserve the world's crop seeds from war, disease and other catastrophes will receive new deposits on Monday (Feb 14), including one from the first organisation that made a withdrawal from the facility. I tell people it's a great story - a sad story - of the seed vault functioning as an insurance policy." "Loss of that collection would be irreplaceable.
"It illustrates why we built it," Cary Fowler tells my colleague Lydia Ramsey. That showed that the vault could serve its function, but hopefully there will be no need for another withdrawal in the near future. In 2015, the ICARDA Seed Bank, which had been in Syria, withdrew samples from the vault - a first - so it could move and restore its seed bank, which had been damaged by war. The seeds arrive sealed in foil and are kept inside sealed boxes to prevent any spoilage.Ī seed sample is filled at a centre in Texcoco, on the outskirts of Mexico City. Each sample contains 500 seeds.īut there's enough space in the vault's three main rooms to store 4.5 million samples, which would be more than 2 billion seeds. So far, there are more than 860,000 samples in the vault, collected since Svalbard opened in 2008. Inside, seeds are moved to a trolley and rolled into the vault's main chamber. The temperature inside is kept to -18 degrees Celsius, cold enough to keep the sealed seeds viable for - in some cases - thousands of years.Īn interior door from the main chamber into one of the three vault rooms. The warning sign says "Applies to all of Svalbard territory."
Plus, The Crop Trust says that polar bears - which outnumber humans on the island - provide an extra "layer of security". There are five doors with coded locks that anyone looking to get into the vault has to pass through. Reuters/Hakon Mosvold Larsen/ScanpixNorway/Pool The vault is unlocked only for deposits, which happen three or four times a year. The rooftop and part of the facade of the building is a work of art with a light installation by Dyveke Sanne, since all public buildings in Norway are legally required to have art. Seed samples are sent to Svalbard in large boxes, which are scanned with X-rays after they get to the island to make sure that they have nothing but seeds inside. Robert Zeigler, director general of the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), shows rice seeds destined for Svalbard. That way, the genetic diversity of crops around the world is kept safe. Technicians at CIMMYT sort samples of wild maize seeds, known as Teocintle, at the centre in Texcoco, on the outskirts of Mexico City. The Svalbard vault is the central fail-safe for all those seed banks.īackups are sent to Svalbard in case a disaster ruins the samples at the home seed bank. The vault has seeds from more than 60 institutions and almost every country in the world, collected from the more than 1,500 global gene banks that store samples of seeds from all the crops native to the region they're in.Ī technician at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT), packs samples of wheat seeds: Since the vault is buried in permafrost, it could stay frozen at least 200 years, even if the power were to go out. It's more than 400 feet (122 m) above sea level, and there's little moisture in the air. Svalbard is the northernmost place in the world that still has scheduled flights, according to the Crop Trust, the group in charge of the global seed bank system. Hidden approximately 400 feet (122 metres) deep inside a mountain on a remote island between mainland Norway and the North Pole, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is designed to come to our rescue if that happens.
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