Us doomsday vault1/26/2024 ![]() They have very little monetary value, but the boxes potentially hold the keys to the future of global food security. In here, the seeds are stored in vacuum-packed silver packets and test tubes in large boxes that are neatly stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves. There are three vaults leading off from the chamber, but only one is currently in use, and its door is covered in a thick layer of ice, hinting at the subzero temperatures inside. At the end of this corridor is a chamber, an added layer of security to protect the vaults containing the seeds. Through one door is a wide concrete tunnel illuminated by strip lighting leading 430 ft. The entrance leads to a small tunnel-like room filled with the loud whirring noise of electricity and cooling systems required to keep the temperature within the vault consistent. Its only neighbor is a similar repository buried away from the dangers of the world: the Arctic World Archive, which aims to preserve data for the world’s governments and private institutions, opened deep in a nearby mine on March 27. It is situated in a safe place,” says Bente Naeverdal, a property manager who oversees the day-to-day operation of the vault. “It is away from the places on earth where you have war and terror, everything maybe you are afraid of in other places. It was precisely for its remoteness that Svalbard was chosen as the location of the vault. Near the entrance to the facility, a rectangular wedge of concrete that juts out starkly against the snowy landscape, the doomsday nickname seems eerily apt. This past winter offered the gene bank a chance to redress the balance. Genetic material is being lost all over the globe,” says Marie Haga, executive director of the Crop Trust. “There are big and small doomsdays going on around the world every day. On this occasion, samples from India, Pakistan and Mexico were being deposited alongside seeds from Syria, many of whose citizens are living through their own apocalypse. But it is the much smaller, localized destruction and threats facing gene banks all over the world that the vault was designed to protect against-and it’s why the vault was opened in February, when TIME visited. The Global Seed Vault has been dubbed the “doomsday” vault, which conjures up an image of a reserve of seeds for use in case of an apocalyptic event or a global catastrophe. It is the farthest north you can fly on a commercial airline, and apart from the nearby town of Longyearbyen, it is a vast white expanse of frozen emptiness. It will take some years to assemble because some genebanks need to multiply stocks of seed first, and other seeds need regenerating before they can be shipped to Svalbard.It would be difficult to find a place more remote than the icy wilderness of Svalbard. The objective of the Seed Vault is to safeguard as much of the world’s unique crop genetic material as possible, while also avoiding unnecessary duplication. ![]() In fact, the Seed Vault already holds the most diverse collection of food crop seeds in the world. These range from unique varieties of major African and Asian food staples such as maize, rice, wheat, cowpea and sorghum to European and South American varieties of eggplant, lettuce, barley and potato. Each packet of seeds consists of an average of 500 seeds, so a maximum of 2.5 billion seeds may be stored in the Seed Vault.Ĭurrently, the Seed Vault holds more than 1.1 million seed varieties, originating from almost every country in the world. The Seed Vault has the capacity to store 4.5 million varieties of crops. Strategic Development of the Crop Trust. ![]() Darwin Initiative-funded Sweetpotato Project.Our Commitment to Responsible Investing.What Will It Cost To Secure Global Diversity Forever?.The need to conserve crop diversity within a rational, efficient global system has been recognized in various international agreements
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