However, with global warming, permafrost is increasingly melting throughout the Arctic, including in the Svalbard Archipelago. Its unique location and geopolitical and climatic stability make it a suitable place for long-term safe storage. The Treaty of Paris, signed by 43 nations, including the United States, Russia and China, made it a demilitarized zone in 1920. The island of Spitsbergen is part of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago situated approximately 1,300 kilometres from the North Pole.
It also serves as a backup for plant breeders to develop new crop varieties.
The so-called Doomsday Vault is a kind of backup plan for agriculture, in case a disaster makes parts of the planet unlivable or if the world were to suffer a catastrophe, such as a nuclear war or extreme climate change. Such cold is enough to keep the seed samples safe for at least 200 years, even without backup power. Photo: Svalbard Global Seed Vault/Riccardo Gangaleīuilt in the depths of Spitsbergen’s permafrost, the Global Seed Vault houses more than 1.1 million seed samples of nearly 6,000 plant species from 89 seed banks globally at a permanent temperature of zero degrees Fahrenheit (about -17 degrees Celsius). “By safeguarding duplicates of these invaluable collections, the Seed Vault offers an insurance policy for our common future.” NordGen staff, Fredrik Kollberg (left) and Åsmund Asdal bring new seed boxes in to final position in the Vault shelves. “The ICARDA story demonstrates perfectly the role and function of the Seed Vault,” said Norway’s Minister of International Development, Anne Beathe Tvinnereim. ICARDA also made two more withdrawals in 20 to rebuild their own collections, now held in Lebanon and Morocco, Reuters reports. They were the first to withdraw seeds from the Global Seed Vault in 2015 to replace a war-damaged collection. The largest deposit, of 6,336 seed samples, will be made by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), which had to relocate its headquarters from Aleppo to Beirut in 2012 because of the war in Syria. The future of the world’s food and nutrition security depends not only on the genetic diversity we have within the major food crops – but also on the diversity of crops that small-scale farmers rely on. We are always excited to receive new species into the Seed Vault. Gene banks from Australia, Germany, Morocco, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, Romania, Slovakia, Sudan and Uganda will store a total of over 20,000 seeds as backups to their own collections. This is the case of wheat samples from the Leibniz Institute for Plant Genetics and Crop Research (IPK), Germany, collected in the Austrian Alpine region in the 1920s – one of the oldest collections in the gene bank. This story shows the practical utility of the Doomsday Vault, which is functioning as an insurance agency.The deposit will include seeds of crop species that were not previously represented in the vault, some of which are particularly rare. For example, this seed-bank helped Syria replace its collection of seeds damaged by the Syrian civil war. The first goal of the Doomsday Vault is not to face the end of the world, but to face the loss of diversity of all ressources. Researchers can study them to understand more things about seeds and to improve them against diseases or climat change. But why Svalbard ? Simply because this area is so cold that the seeds can stay frozen in the permafrost. To sum up, it is an international seed-bank backup, to conserve all the genetics ressources for plant breeding. The Doomsday Vault is used to replace the sample if a regional seed vault loses something. It is used as a back-up drive for the human heritage. According to him, the Doomsday Vault should be compared as a deposit box where all natural ressources are stocked. Cary Fowler, the ‘father » of the seed vault is the former executive director of Crop Trust. Every kind of seed is stored there and recently, 50.000 seeds have made their way to this vault.Īlmost 50.000 new samples of seeds have been added last Wednesday to the Doomsday Vault in the cold area of Svalbard, an archipelago of Norway located in the Artic Ocean, between the North Pole and Norway. In Norway, in the archipelago named Svalbard stands the Doomsday Vault which is a seed-bank.
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