Doomsday Vault
Built ten years ago, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault sprung a leak last year after the permafrost melted due to global warming. Norway is spending $ 20m to renovate the facility and make it more secure.
What is the Doomsday Vault? The Svalbard Global Seed Vault or Doomsday Vault as it is nicknamed, is a seed bank that can store 4.5 million seeds from several species of plants. It is a reserve to be used in case Earth is struck by a great disaster and all plant life becomes extinct. There are more than 1.5 million species of different agricultural crops currently known. Where is it located?
The Doomsday Vault is located on the remote Svalbard island of Norway. It has been built at a depth of 125 metres inside a sandstone mountain, about 800 km from the North Pole. A tunnel connects it to the outside.
How is the Vault constructed?
The Vault is actually made up of three vaults. The vaults have doors with air locks and the concrete walls are reinforced with plastic. The temperature inside is maintained between -18oC and -20oC. If the power fails, its location in the snow-clad mountain ensures that the temperature is maintained for at least 200 years. The seeds are packed in special sealed moistureproof pouches.
In the aftermath of what kind of disasters will the Vault prove useful?
Floods, famines, disease epidemics, nuclear explosions, a meteor or asteroid strike and most importantly, climate change. Over the centuries, man has developed thousands of useful crops. The Vault stores seeds of plants that are no longer widely grown, and so have become rare.
Was there any attempt to store seeds before?
Seed banks have been around since the 1920s. Today, there are about 1,400 seed banks around the world, each serving as a genetic library for several thousand different crop varieties. But many of them are inefficiently managed. To ensure the safety of the crops stored in these local banks, the Svalbard Vault will preserve samples of these as well.