Preparing seeds for doomsday scenario

HELSINKI, FINLAND — Nearly 10 years after a “doomsday” seed vault opened on an Arctic island, some 50,000 new samples from collections around the globe have been deposited in the world’s largest repository, built to safeguard against wars or natural disasters wiping out food crops.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a gene bank built underground on the isolated island in a permafrost zone some 1,000 kilometers from the North Pole, was opened in 2008 as a master backup to the world’s other seed banks, in case their deposits are lost.

The latest specimens sent to the bank, located on the Svalbard archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, include more than 15,000 reconstituted samples from an international research center that focuses on improving agriculture in dry zones.

They were the first to retrieve seeds from the vault in 2015 before returning new ones after multiplying and reconstituting them.

The specimens consisted of seed samples for some of the world’s most vital food sources.

Speaking from Svalbard, Aly Abousabaa, the head of the International Center for Agricultural Research, said on Thursday that borrowing and reconstituting the seeds before returning them had been a success and showed that it was possible to “find solutions to pressing regional and global challenges.”

The 50,000 samples deposited on Wednesday were from Benin, India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Netherlands, the US, Mexico, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus and Britain. Total deposits in the vault, with a capacity of 4.5 million, now stand at 940,000.