SEED OF HOPE
‘Doomsday Vault’ will feed world in future ‘food apocalypse’ – but it’s forbidden to enter more than three times a year
The vault played a critical role in restoring damaged seed collections in Syria between 2015 and 2019
HALF-BURIED in an Arctic mountain, on an island between Norway and the North Pole, protrudes a giant metal wedge.
And while it looks like a staircase to a dungeon, this so-called 'Doomsday Vault' may actually be our ticket out of extinction.
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It's called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and it is forbidden to enter more than three times a year.
It is not open to tourists.
And you can only visit on organised trips to the entrance with guides, unless you have an offering.
After launching in 2008, the icy crypt houses more than 1.25million varieties of food crops.
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“Inside this building is 13,000 years of agricultural history,” Brian Lainoff, lead partnerships coordinator of the Crop Trust, which manages the vault, told TIME magazine earlier this year.
It is the ultimate backup plan for the world's food, and protects plants from all external destruction, like war and disease.
“There are big and small doomsdays going on around the world every day,” Marie Haga, executive director of the Crop Trust, also told TIME.
"Genetic material is being lost all over the globe."
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The vault played a critical role in restoring damaged seed collections in Syria between 2015 and 2019, when the country was ravaged by war.
Svalbard's Global Seed Vault has even inspired a similar lunar biorepository that would store both seeds and the DNA of endangered species on the Moon.
The chambers, some 430ft down, are only opened three times a year to limit the seeds' exposure to the outside world.
Inside, temperatures sit around -18 degrees Celsius (-0.4 degrees Fahrenheit) which, alongside limited access to oxygen, can suspend the seeds from ageing.
This relatively small amount of money is our insurance policy, our insurance policy that we're going to be able to feed the world in 50 years.
Geoffrey Hawtin, executive board member at the Global Crop Diversity Trust
Many of the seeds inside the vault are wild or ancient varieties, which are typically not used any longer.
In February, the vault received a record number of seed offerings.
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Earth's 'insurance policy'
The vault's purpose isn't just to preserve old and contemporary strains of plants - but to give scientists the building blocks to conjure up new ones, if necessary.
Deep in the Nordic ice is enough genetic diversity and DNA to develop new strains that will grow in a future where Earth might be really hot, or really cold, or really dark.
There are some 200,000 varieties of rice within the vault.
And one of those species could have the trait needed to adapt rice to higher temperatures, or low-light - depending on what the future has in store for our blue planet.
“To a lot of people today, it sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It's a valuable natural resource and you want to offer robust protection for it,” Geoffrey Hawtin, an agricultural scientist from the UK and executive board member at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, told Euro News in May.
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“Fifteen years ago, shipping a lot of seeds to the closest place to the North Pole that you can fly into, putting them inside a mountain - that's the craziest idea anybody ever had.”
He added: “This relatively small amount of money is our insurance policy, our insurance policy that we're going to be able to feed the world in 50 years."