There are also the Svalbard archipelagos most notorious security guards to consider. Norway on Friday announced $13 million in upgrades to what was originally a $9 million construction job, reports Reuters. The vault is secured by four sets of locked doors, according to the Crop Trust. Seeds aren't the only thing pouring into the vault: money, too, in order to extend the vault's "viability," as Bloomberg puts it. Dubbed the doomsday vault, the facility lies on the island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, halfway between Norway and the North Pole, and is only opened a few times a. Voice of America reports 73 institutions from around the globe have contributed seeds, and it points out a notable country not found on the list: China, though it's apparently discussing the possibility of making a deposit.
Nearly two thirds of the specimens are unique to the Middle. Though the vault is thought of as a 'doomsday vault' that will be the source of seeds for the world after a. That's enough to nearly fill one of the vault's three chambers, leaving room for what scientists believe will be the eventual total count: 2.2 million crops. Thousands of seeds housed high in the Arctic for safekeeping have been recalled to North Africa. The Global Seed Vault opened in 2008 on Svalbard, Norway, above the Arctic Circle. The BBC puts its number of deposits at 1,059,646, which is 90,000 less than what could have been following a withdrawal related to the war in Syria. The Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway, has since 2008 stored seeds within a mountain on a Norwegian island 800 miles from the North Pole, and on Monday the number of crops it stores crossed the 1 million mark, thanks to a new shipment that included varieties of black-eyed pea and the Bambara groundnut. One hopes, of course, that the doomsday vault will never be needed, but it’s still good to know it’s there - and that the seeds within it can be stored safely for more than a millenium.Monday was a "really significant" day for the so-called Doomsday Vault-and not just because it was its 10th birthday. Each vault can hold 1.5 million sample packages of all types of crop seeds, from carrots to wheat. The seeds are packed in silvery foil containers - as many as 500 in each sample - and placed on blue and orange metal shelves inside three 10-by-27-meter (32-by-88-foot) storage chambers. Stoltenberg and Maathai made the first deposit in the vault - a box of rice seeds from 104 countries. Due to the climate, it is relatively easy to cool the vaults air to the required temperature of -18☌ (-0.4☏) But as soon as the seed bank opened, it became clear there were going to be problems. “It is very important for Africa to store seeds here because anything can happen to our national seed banks,” Maathai said, bundled up against the cold. Food and Agriculture Organization and Biodiversity International, a Rome-based research group. She is a board member of Crop Diversity Trust, which collects the seeds for the Svalbard vault. Operated by regjeringen nordgen croptrust www.
It is a precaution for the future,” said 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai of Kenya. Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a backup facility for the crop diversity stored in the worlds genebanks. It will serve as a backup for the other 1,400 seed banks around the world, in case their deposits are hit by disasters, economic collapse, war or climate change.įor example, war wiped out seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and one in the Philippines was flooded in the wake of a typhoon in 2006. It is built to withstand global warning, earthquakes and even nuclear strikes. Svalbard Global Seed Vault, just 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the North Pole, is designed to house as many as 4.5 million crop seeds from all over the world.
“It is the Noah’s Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations,” said Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg. “This is a frozen Garden of Eden,” European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said at the opening ceremony Tuesday, as guests carried the first seed deposits into the icy vault, deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. HELSINKI -Nearly 10 years after a doomsday seed vault opened on an Arctic island, some 50,000 new samples from seed collections around the world have been deposited in the world’s largest. It’s a remarkable venture - and an even more remarkable piece of engineering: The so-called “doomsday” seed vault opened recently in Norway.