Dispelling seeds of doubt about doomsday vault
The Washington Post
’Tis the time of year to get seeds for the coming growing season. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic Circle got a delivery of more than 76,000 seed batches from gene banks in 22 countries.
But these are not for germinating — not yet, anyway. Sometimes referred to as the doomsday seed vault, the chilled storage chambers are located within a mountain on Norway’s island of Spitsbergen and form the protected repository of the word’s food crops.
The recent ceremonial arrival of rice, wheat, barley, legumes and other seeds put the vault’s inventory at more than 1 million varieties of crops. It also marked the vault’s 10th anniversary.
Officials with the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and the Crop Trust were on hand to receive a total of 179 boxes of seed from gene banks around the world, including two in the United States.
Jon Georg Dale, Norway’s minister of agriculture and food, said in a statement that in a period of extreme weather and an increasing global population “it is more important than ever to ensure that seeds — the foundation of our food supply and the future of our agriculture — are safely conserved.”
The Norwegian government also announced a $12.7 million plan to improve the vault with the construction of a new access tunnel and a service building to house emergency power and refrigerating units. The proposal stems from flooding at the entrance from an unexpected thaw in the permafrost, though none of the seed stocks were affected.
The vault is not exactly at the North Pole, but it’s nearer to it than just about anywhere else, and well inside the Arctic Circle on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
This beguiling structure juts out from a mountain near the town of Longyearbyen, which is reputed to be the northernmost permanent settlement on
Earth and a place where residents must go about their business with rifles slung over their backs, on account of the polar bears. The sun falls below the horizon on Nov. 14 and isn’t seen again until March 8.
It is precisely this remoteness and coldness that led scientist Cary Fowler and his colleagues at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, now known as the Crop Trust, to persuade the Norwegian government to locate the vault there.
The seed vault has taken on a mythic quality around the world, perhaps because its entrance — stark, geometric, bejeweled by a light sculpture by Norwegian artist Dyveke Sanne — hints at something not just hidden but forbidden. Bauhaus meets Valhalla.
Fowler, with principal photographer Mari Tefre, also wrote a book on the vault, called “Seeds on Ice,” that lifts the veil on the place, which is not open to the public even though it quickly became the second most recognized structure in Norway.
Svalbard’s beguiling paradox of fame and mystery inevitably has spawned various wacky conspiracy theories, including the idea that the vault is a top-secret NATO facility housing a global eugenics project. Fowler hopes the book will dispel a more mainstream misapprehension: that this is a doomsday vault, a time capsule to unlock after a nuclear Armageddon.
The seeds come from the existing seed banks across the globe, and they are insurance against the loss of an irreplaceable crop to something as unexciting as a budget crisis in a poor country (or a rich one) to, yes, a cataclysmic nuclear war.
Each seed has its own genetic makeup, and the value of these stocks is in their DNA. If a new disease or pest were to wipe out a strain of wheat, for example, it’s probable that the germ plasm at Svalbard could be used to breed in resistance.
Climate change poses another tangible threat, as extreme weather events, rising waters and shifts in temperatures require the development of new varieties to handle the challenges.
In part, the Svalbard vault is best understood by what it is not: It is not a vast subterranean laboratory staffed with the world’s boffins in white coats, a la CERN or a James Bond movie. It is a hole in a mountain, a tunnel that extends a few hundred feet and terminates in three chambers, each 90 feet long, 30 feet wide and 16 feet high. Only one is in use at the moment.
It is simple, relatively cheap to run, and designed to withstand physical calamity and human interference. It is meant to last a thousand years or more.
It is not permanently staffed, though it is constantly monitored and the seeds are housed behind at least five locked doors. You couldn’t just show up and loiter with intent. You would be noticed by the local police, or the controllers in the distant airport tower or the polar bears.