“This is supposed to last for eternity,” said Åsmund Asdal at the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre, which operates the seed vault. The glittering entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault leads into a 100-metre tunnel dug in the side of a cave at Longyearbyen, a remote Arctic archipelago in Norway. It is a big responsibility and we take it very seriously. They have also removed electrical equipment from the tunnel that produced some heat and installed pumps in the vault itself in case of a future flood.Īschim said there was no option but to find solutions to ensure the enduring safety of the vault: “We have to find solutions. The vault managers are now taking precautions, including major work to waterproof the 100m-long tunnel into the mountain and digging trenches into the mountainside to channel meltwater and rain away. The climate is changing dramatically and we are all amazed at how quickly it is going,” Isaksen told Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet. “The Arctic and especially Svalbard warms up faster than the rest of the world. The Svalbard archipelago, of which Spitsbergen is part, has warmed rapidly in recent decades, according to Ketil Isaksen, from Norway’s Meteorological Institute. Department of Agriculture, National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation.“The question is whether this is just happening now, or will it escalate?” said Aschim. If African farmers can use improved seeds and better. "We're seeing in several of the soybean varieties intriguing traits that could allow farmers to confront such problems as drought or extreme heat, shorter or longer growing seasons, or higher levels of CO2 ," said Dave Ellis, curator at the U.S. With a new headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, ICARDA has asked for 38,000 seeds to be withdrawn from the vault to resume research on arid crops. Other seeds shipped to the doomsday vault include: semi-dwarf wheat and rice from the early 1960s disease-resistant soybeans and the German pink tomato, a hardy sweet-flavored tomato transported to Iowa in 1883 by a Bavarian immigrant. "Svalbard is a fail-safe backup to be used whenever a depositing seed bank loses part or all of its collection, but we should focus equally on averting the disasters in the first place," Fowler said. Material directly acquired by plant breeders to develop disease-resistant and "climate-ready" crops, and to meet the challenge of rapidly growing populations, is maintained by genebanks, not the seed vault. Like all seeds coming to the vault, the new ones are duplicates of those from other collections. "Keys are coded to allow access to different levels of the facility. "Anyone seeking access to the seeds themselves will have to pass through four locked doors: the heavy steel entrance doors, a second door approximately 115 meters down the tunnel and finally the two keyed air-locked doors," the Trust writes. The preciousness of such seeds is reflected in the inaccessible nature of the vault. "The region on Svalbard surrounding the Seed Vault is remote, severe, and inhabited by polar bears," according to the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which helps to support the vault's operations. The arctic permafrost offers natural freezing for the seeds, while additional cooling brings the temperatures down to minus 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 18 degrees Celsius).Īnd if the mountain of snow enshrouding the storage rooms isn't enough protection, what better body guard than one of nature's biggest beasts. The Vault is dug into the Platåberget mountain, which means "plateau mountain," and is located near the village of Longyearbyen, Svalbard – a group of islands north of mainland Norway.
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