It has the capacity to safeguard up to 4.5 million crop types. In terms of containment, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is impressive. NordGen/Johan B äckman, via Wikimedia Commons Svalbard Seed Vault volume and variety Its engineers even accounted for rising sea levels, building the facility high enough that maximum water swell would not affect the seeds.īut, as we shall see, even the smartest people can’t see everything coming. Despite the harsh Arctic climate (and in part because of it), the instability that could upend the gene banks is unlikely to upend the Vault. In some cases, though, the facilities are located in regions subject to underfunding and mismanagement, upheavals and war – such as the gene bank in Aleppo, which years of conflict in Syria has rendered all but inaccessible. These banks, protected biorepositories of organic material, house everything from plant tissues to animal embryos. Rather, it is the island’s geological stability, low humidity, geopolitical isolation, and (traditionally) cold climate that contribute to the Vault’s purpose, which is to provide the final reserve of vital crops in the event any of the planet’s 1,700 gene banks are compromised.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is located on the island of Spitsbergen, the largest in the Svalbard archipelago, which surprisingly was not chosen for its stark aspect: Indeed, Spitsbergen cruises are one of the most popular Arctic trips for viewing polar bears and glacial fjords. The whole scene looks like the title sequence of the next Philip K. Standing guard is a blinking red security system you could easily imagine scanning your fingerprints, eyes, and thoughts.ĭown this tunnel, scientists buried in thick coats and hardhats wheel trollies packed with mysterious black boxes bound for the belly of the Vault. Step through its grim gray doors and you find yourself in a cylindrical steel tunnel drilled 100 meters into the solid rock, straight through the permafrost. If that name isn’t the stuff of science fiction, consider the place: The entrance, a tilted monolith of concrete and steel, jabs out of the side of an ice-clutched Arctic mountain like some kind of wintry cubist bunker. Among its staff, however, it’s called simply the “Vault”. One of these precautions is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, known to some as the Doomsday Vault. What we hear less about, however, are the real-life precautions governments and research groups take in case any of these scenarios bear fruit – or rather, threaten to wipe it all out.īy Miksu (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons Enter the Svalbard Global Seed Vault These often come in the form of annihilating wars, pulverizing natural catastrophes, or sweeping pandemics that leave bands of ragged survivors scrambling for boxed potatoes and bullets amid hordes of cannibalistic zombies. Literature, cinema, even video games give us no small supply of global disaster scenarios.

Hope for the future, plan for the fallout

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