The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was built by optimists and pragmatists, who wanted to do something to preserve options so that humanity and its crops might be better prepared for change. But we were tired, fed up, and frankly scared of the steady, cumulative losses of crop diversity. Such guarantees don’t exist in the world. We knew that nothing we could conjure would provide an ironclad guarantee. A room for storing seeds inside a mountain near the North Pole? Are you kidding? Norway said yes. Government administrations the world over are risk averse. But back in 2004, when the Seed Vault was proposed, it might equally have been viewed as a crazy, impractical, unnecessary, and expensive idea, another grand government folly. When the first vault room is filled with close to 1.5 million samples, about the maximum number of distinct varieties we think exist, it will contain nearly a billion seeds with a weight approaching 80 tons.Įveryone can look back now and say that the Seed Vault was a good and obvious idea, and that of course the Norwegian government should have approved and funded it. Thus far 2,291 boxes have been shipped to the Seed Vault. Typically, 400 to 500 samples with about 500 seeds each fit in a box, depending on the size of the seed. Most seeds are packaged in heat-sealed, laminated, moisture-proof, air-tight foil packages. And yet, more seeds are on their way to Svalbard. A simple single-spaced listing of all the crops in the Seed Vault would run 55 pages long. Seeds of some are capable of retaining their ability to sprout for thousands of years.Īs of the fall of 2015, after just seven years of operation, samples of more than 880,000 crop varieties or populations are being preserved, from virtually every country on Earth. Frozen in such conditions inside the mountain, seeds of most major crops will remain viable for hundreds of years, or longer. In sealed boxes, behind multiple locked doors, monitored by electronic security systems (not to mention the occasional visit from indigenous polar bears), enveloped in frigid, below-zero temperatures, and surrounded and insulated by tons of rock, hundreds of millions of seeds are protected in their mountain fortress. Virtually everything, every trait we might want our crops to have in the future, can be found in this genetic diversity.įew people will ever see or come into contact with the contents of this vault. Plant breeders and farmers will draw upon this diversity to help crops keep pace with a warmer climate and ever-evolving pests and diseases. This is a seed collection, but more importantly it is a collection of the traits found within the seeds: the genes that give one variety resistance to a particular pest and another variety tolerance for hot, dry weather. With growing evidence that unchecked climate change will seriously undermine food production and threaten the diversity of crops around the world, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault ( above) represents a major step towards ensuring the preservation of hundreds of thousands of crop varieties.
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