The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a type of insurance policy we humans have in case of a big emergency that would wipe out most of the agricultural industry and crops in the world. It is often referred to as a doomsday vault, which is in fact pretty accurate, because its purpose it to allow us to go and get back important crop seeds after a potential doomsday scenario.
The entrance to the seed vault. Image by Frode Ramone, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
The vault itself is located on the Norwegian island Spitsbergen (called Svalbard in Norwegian), close to Longyearbyen, just over 1,300 kilometers away from the magnetic north pole. This seed vault is one of the largest in the world, but it is far from the only one, and there are currently over 70 other genetic seed banks like this one in other parts of the world.
Physically it just looks like a big metal bar that sticks out of the snow, as you can see from the image above. However, behind this is a 120 long tunnel that leads into the mountain! At the end there is a big space with lots of containers for long-term containment of biological samples, with the possibility of storing up to 4.5 million seeds in total.
The tunnels leading into the seed vault. Image by Johan Bäckman, posted as Public Domain.
Water leakage and repair
I actually wrote a post about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault 8 months ago because water had been leaking into the facility, potentially causing damage to the seeds that were stored there. What happened was that permafrost outside the vault had melted due to increasing temperatures in the area, and some of this seeped into the vault tunnel itself. Luckily no seeds were damaged, but it’s pretty ironic that a vault designed to survive a doomsday scenario did not manage to stay dry during some ice melting. I guess the designers did not take the global warming into account.
This incident has led to a discussion if the seed vault should be upgraded, and the Norwegian government has proposed to spend 100 million crowns to upgrade it. This is almost 13 million USD, so we are talking about a lot of money, but who can put a price on saving the agricultural industry from a doomsday scenario?
While it might sound crazy to invest such a high sum into upgrading the seed vault, it is important to remember that this does serve a very needed function. If most of our crops were to be lost due to war, a natural disaster or another big disaster, then getting back our good crops is next to impossible. It has taken many, many years of selective breeding on the crops to increase their yield, growth-time, and resistance to pests and disease, so this has a potentially huge value if something happens.
What it actually looks like where the seeds are stored. Image by Dag Terje Filip Endresen, posted as Public Domain.
Returning seeds to Syria
As we all know, Syria is currently facing a huge crisis with lots of armed conflict. This led to many crops being lost, and species that was adapted to being grown in the Syrian regions were lost. Luckily these crops were backed up at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and the seed vault returned 130 boxes of seeds with over 115,000 seed samples. This allowed farmers in the region to regrow the local crops again, which is obviously better than importing crops from another region.
Hitting the one million seed milestone!
What I wanted to share with you guys today is that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault hit two major milestones at the same time; it officially celebrated its 10-year anniversary, and hit the magic number of 1,000,000 seeds in the vault, with the exact number being 1,059,646.
As I mentioned earlier, there is room for a total of 4.5 million seeds, so it can still house over 3 million more, so hopefully different organizations will keep collecting important seeds to send away for long-term storage.
Congratulations to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault for hitting these two milestones!
Thanks for reading
Thanks for reading my post about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and the milestones it recently hit. I hope you enjoyed it and learned something new.
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