Deep inside of a mountain on a remote arctic island, lies a bunker called Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Wanting to preserve and ensure that seeds will continue to flourish and play an integral role in the future, an organization called Crop Trust has established a seed vault to serve as a backup storage facility for the world’s unique crop genetic material.
Built on a remote island in Svalbard archipelago above sea level to avoid possible rising sea levels, the vault has also been built 100 metres deep into the mountain to withstand any dangers from the world. Geographically located in an unforgiving subzero temperature environment, the freezing condition provides a cost-effective and natural fail-safe method for conserving the seeds.
There are as many as 1,700 vaults called gene banks located all over the world. These genebanks collect genetic material for the purpose of preserving and sharing for agricultural research, and Crop Trust’s ultimate goal is to house a copy of every unique seed that exists around the world in the Svalbard vault. With the capacity to store 2.5 billion seeds in total, the Svalbard vault currently stores 890,000 seed samples originating from all around the world. The underlying purpose of the Svalbard vault is to be the final seed backup in the worst case scenario of all other 1,700 gene banks being compromised due to factors such as wars, natural disasters, and or a lack of funding.
There has already been a case where the Svalbard vault has been put to use in a real-life context. The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) based in Syria, was forced to flee its headquarters in 2012 due to the Syrian civil war and had lost their gene bank. Re-establishing itself in Morocco and Lebanon in 2015, ICARDA has since restarted the gene bank by withdrawing seeds from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
To learn more about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, click the link below.
https://www.croptrust.org/our-work/svalbard-global-seed-vault/
