![]() ![]() Though dozens of institutions have deposited seeds at the vault, there has only ever been one withdrawal. The Crop Trust expects to have to start cooling down the second vault room for seed storage within the next couple of years. To date, there are only 880,837 seed samples in the vault, filling only three-quarters of the first vault room. Each has the capacity to hold over 1 million seed samples.” At the end of the tunnel, there are three separate vault rooms. ![]() “You enter into a small holding chamber of sorts, then you walk through another door into this long tunnel – it’s about 120 meters long – that slopes downward deeper into the mountain. “The vault is really interesting, but at the same time it’s essentially a natural freezer in the side of a mountain,” Martin explains. With the coming-into-force of the international treaty in 2004, that set a good legal foundation for the creation of the vault,” says Cierra Martin, partnerships and communications assistant at the Crop Trust.Īfter deciding to construct the vault in Svalbard – perfect due to its remote location and permafrost, as the seeds need to be kept frozen in order to remain viable – the government of Norway scoped out locations, eventually deciding to build the vault into a mountain. “Plans to construct the Seed Vault started as early as the 1980s, but they didn’t have international agreement to regulate the area or to support such a huge endeavor, so things fell by the wayside. Funded by the government of Norway and operated in part by Norway, the Nordic Genetic Resources Center and the Crop Trust – an independent organization created to help support and build a global system of crop conservation – the vault was opened in 2008 and immediately started storing backup seed collections. But, because nearly any building is prone to natural disasters, human catastrophes or other failures, they needed a backup location to protect seed duplicates if the worst-case scenario were ever to become reality.Įnter the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. More than 1,700 genebanks – many of which have been operating for decades – hold seed collections for safekeeping. The treaty lays the groundwork for not only conserving crop diversity, but for making seeds available for agricultural use. The world decided to address seed extinction in 2004, when the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture was established. What happens to those unused plant species when farmers stop planting them? They fall out of use and, eventually, become extinct. Hidden deep in the permanently frozen mountainscape of the world’s northernmost inhabited place, lies the ultimate agricultural failsafe for cities and populations around the globe: a remote vault with the capacity to store billions of seeds.Ī sharp decline in seed biodiversity – largely due to the fact that three-quarters of the world’s food supply comes from just 12 plant species, including major staples like rice, wheat and maize – has made preservation of seed and crop diversity more important than ever. ![]()
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