Norway to upgrade global ‘doomsday’ seed vault in Arctic
Norway plans to spend 100 million kroner (Dh46.8m) in upgrading a doomsday seed vault built to protect the world’s food supplies, the government said.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, acts as a natural deep freeze in backing up the world’s gene banks.
It was built 10 years ago as a fail-safe in the event of global crises or disasters such as a nuclear war or global warming, and contains up to 900,000 seed samples.
The revamp will cover “construction of a new, concrete-built access tunnel, as well as a service building to house emergency power and refrigerating units, and other electrical equipment that emits heat through the tunnel,” the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food said.
In late 2016, an unexpected thaw of permafrost meant water flowed into the entrance of the tunnel to the vault.
The bank reportedly cost US$9m (Dh33m) in 2008. In 2015, researchers made their first withdrawal from the vault after Syria’s civil war damaged a seed bank near the city of Aleppo. The seeds were grown and deposited at the Svalbard vault last year.
“This demonstrates that the seed vault is a worldwide insurance for food supply for future generations,” Agriculture Minister Jon Georg Dale said.
The first withdrawal took place in 2015 after damage to an Aleppo seed bank in Syria’s war