An Ark for FoodĬurrently, the facility holds around 930,000 seed samples representing 5,000 plant species. As the globe warms, this small ditch is not enough to protect the warehouse from surface runoff. This has meant warming temperatures, avalanches, rain and, most damaging for the seed vault, melting permafrost. In a cruelly ironic twist for what is meant to be a doomsday backup for civilization, climate change is working faster here than in many other places around the world. Svalbard was thought to be the perfect place to preserve and store seeds because it is a polar desert-cold and dry, with little snow and not much rain. Twenty years ago, this trench might have been sufficient. “I think that's quite a good comparison.” But now, on its tenth anniversary, the initiative is confronting one of the very forces it is meant to protect against: global warming.Ī small drainage ditch in front of the entrance diverts rainwater streaming down the cold rock of the mountain. “People call the vault a Noah’s Ark for seeds,” says Asdal, a biologist and agronomist. The storage vault-in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago 800 miles above the Arctic Circle-was designed to ensure that nature’s vast array of genes is not lost.Īt the entrance tunnel to the warehouse, the wind is drowned out by the roar of a cooling system that deepens the freeze in the space to minus 18☌ (0☏)-a temperature ensuring that seed samples stay viable in the event of a global cataclysm. Today the wide range of plants that humans have relied on throughout history is threatened by the clones of modern industrial agriculture, new diseases, and climate change. “The main reason we have civilization is that humans developed ways of using seeds,” says Asdal, the operations and management coordinator of the facility, as he peers over the steering wheel through the haze. Longyearbyen, SvalbardThe windshield wipers on the SUV work overtime as Åsmund Asdal zigzags up the fog-covered mountain to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
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