![]() ![]() It would be difficult to find a place more remote than the icy wilderness of Svalbard. “Inside this building is 13,000 years of agricultural history,” says Brian Lainoff, lead partnerships coordinator of the Crop Trust, which manages the vault, as he hauls open the huge steel door leading inside the mountain. It is essentially a huge safety deposit box, holding the world’s largest collection of agricultural biodiversity. ![]() Millions of these tiny brown specks, from more than 930,000 varieties of food crops, are stored in the Global Seed Vault on Spitsbergen, part of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. It’s not coal, oil or precious minerals, but seeds. "Genetic material is being lost all over the globe.” When the unthinkable happens, it's comforting to know Svalbard exists.ĭeep in the bowels of an icy mountain on an island above the Arctic Circle between Norway and the North Pole lies a resource of vital importance for the future of humankind. “There are big and small doomsdays going on around the world every day," says Marie Haga, Crop Trust Executive Director. When TIME visited, samples from around the globe were being deposited alongside seeds returning to the vault from ICARDA, originally based in Syria. "But it is the much smaller, localized destruction and threats facing genebanks all over the world that the vault was designed to protect against," writes journalist Jennifer Duggan. The Vault has been dubbed by many as the 'doomsday' vault, conjuring up images of a seed reserve for apocalyptic times.
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