by RACHEL NUWER
In case of disaster, around 825,000 crop plants are stored as seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault PHOTO/Mari Tefre/Svalbard Globale Seed Vault
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault could be mistaken for a set piece from a futuristic Stanley Kubrick film. It juts out of the side of a mountain in Svalbard – a remote Norwegian archipelago located near the North Pole – and in the eternal darkness of the high north’s winter, it glows an eerie, pale blue. It’s during those cold months that scientists choose to load their precious cargo into the vault: the seeds of 825,000 crop plants, and counting.
Also called the “Doomsday Vault”, the facility is designed as a safe guard against those plants’ extinction – many of them essential food. In principle, these crops could prevent humanity’s demise should a global catastrophe occur.
Due to the cold temperatures within the mountain, the vault’s electricity could fail for decades before the seeds perished. The seeds come from all over – the US, Russia, North Korea and beyond – with no regard for political boundaries. “The seeds are all getting along fine, there’s been no fighting yet,” jokes Cary Fowler, an agriculturalist who designed the seed vault and is currently head of its advisory council, and is also a senior advisor to the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
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