A ‘bunker’ inside a Norwegian mountain houses the vegetable ‘Noah’s Ark’
Hidden deep within an icy mountain, on a remote island in the Svalbard archipelago, halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole, lies World Seed Bank, which some call ‘The Ark of Biodiversity’ and others ‘The Doomsday Crypt’ and ‘The Doomsday Vault’. This world seed bank is the largest reserve of crop diversity on the planet. Treasure the seeds that could save a post-apocalyptic world. A lifeline for humanity; or, as some scientists have put it, ‘the most important room in the world’.
This underground facility, Built to withstand the passage of time and natural or man-made disasters, it already contains more than a million seed samples.coming from almost every country in the world: 30,000 years of agriculture.
Although there are more than 1,700 genebanks on the planet with collections of food crops in custody, many of them are vulnerable and exposed not only to natural disasters and wars, but also to avoidable adversities, such as lack of financing or poor management. .
But what happens to plant species when farmers stop planting them? They fall into disuse and eventually become extinct. AND the loss of a crop variety is as irreversible as the extinction of any form of life.
With the idea of safeguard all plant biodiversity on Earth Svalbard Global Seed Vault was born, a ‘bunker’ with the capacity to store 4.5 million varieties of crops, each of which will contain an average of 500 seeds, so up to 2,250 million can be saved of seeds.
disaster proof
In the event of a cataclysmic crop failure due to, say, a virulent new disease, or if all other samples of a given crop were destroyed, the world could count on the existing collection on this ‘vegetable noah’s ark‘ to provide the source material for new varieties.
The World Seed Bank was built disaster proof by the Government of Norway. Kenyan environmental activist and Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, now late, starred in the first deposit, a box of rice seeds, in February 2008.
The facility is managed and operated in partnership between the Scandinavian country’s Ministry of Agriculture and Food, the Nordic Center for Genetic Resources (NordGen) and the international organization Crop Trust.
Norway spent €8.3 million building the World Seed Bank and then invested another €20 million in technically upgrading the facility, as suffered recurring water leaks in the entrance tunnel (the seeds were not affected) due to melting caused by climate change. The annual cost of operating the Seed Vault is approximately one million euros.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened its doors just a few days ago for the first seed deposit of the year: 10 genebanks from around the world deposited 39 boxes containing 20,443 samples, bringing the total count of a 1,145,862 seeds. Germplasm banks from Australia, Germany, Morocco, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, Romania, Slovakia, Sudan and Uganda participated.
Samples of Spanish origin
Are there Spanish seeds too? There are. The first 1,080 Spanish varieties, from the INIA-CSIC, are already in these arctic facilities. “Of them, 300 are winter cereals, 114 of which correspond to wheat; 510 are legumes, of which 189 are beans; 200 are horticultural, 81 of them tomatoes, and 108 are corn varieties,” explained the CSIC when these samples were transferred to Svalbard. The term of the deposit is usually 10 renewable years.
These 1,080 varieties are a small representation compared to the more than 30,000 samples that are kept in the base collection that the CRF has at its headquarters in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid).
What kind of seeds are in the ‘biodiversity ark’? almost everything: about 140,000 different samples of wheat varieties; 150,000 rice samples; 70,000 barley samples; and between 10,000 and 20,000 samples of different types of potatoes, peas, sorghum and many other crops. Which there is not, nor will there be, they are genetically modified seeds.
Are there Spanish seeds in the ‘Doomsday Crypt’? Well yes: 7,055 unique samples originating in Spain, although none of them contributed by the Spanish Government. But it has entered 2.63 million dollars (2.32 million euros) to the Crop Trust Endowment Fund.
Although the Vault is owned by Norway, the countries and institutions that contribute the seeds remain their owners and all the seeds are sealed under ‘black box’ conditions: no one except the depositories can access them or remove them from the gigantic silo. Storage is free.
Inside the ‘Doomsday Vault’ there are no conflicts: boxes are stacked in the order of arrival. So the seeds from North Korea are next to those from the United States, and those from Ukraine very close to those from Russia. Any seed is accepted as a priceless biological treasure. The goal is that all terrestrial food biodiversity can be preserved forever.The safest place on earth
The location of the Vault was decided by considering it the safest on earth. Furthermore, when governments began to talk about the danger climate change poses to crops, Norway emerged as one of the only places that both developing and industrialized countries still trusted.
So if an agreement was to be reached on building a safe haven for the seeds, Norway was the best option. Hence, governments as far apart politically as Washington and Pyongyang agreed to deposit backup copies of their most precious plant resources in Svalbard.
While climate change is a serious concern for sustainable food production around the world, the World Seed Bank itself is not affected by it, and its guardians do not expect it to be affected in the future either. The seeds will keep for centuries. There are reasons for hope:
–The Seed Vault was built 130 meters above sea levelwhich ensures that the floor of the facility will remain dry even if the two poles were to melt.
–The three seed chambers are carved into a mountain of solid rock and the tunnel leading to the chambers is made of waterproof concrete.
–Permafrost conditions in the chambers imply a lower energy requirement for mechanical cooling to -18ºC.
–The vault is impervious to volcanic activity, earthquakes, radiation and rising sea levelsand in the event of a power failure, the permafrost (permanently frozen layer of ice) outside will act as a natural refrigerant.
Crops at risk of extinction
“As the pace of climate change and biodiversity loss increases, there is a new urgency around efforts to save endangered food crops”, says Stefan Schmitz, CEO of the Crop Trust.
“The vast scope of the February 2020 seed deposit reflects global concern about the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss on food production, but more importantly, it demonstrates a increasing global commitment of institutions and countries that have made deposits and, by extension, the world, for the conservation and use of crop diversity& rdquor;, adds Schmitz.
Plans to build the Seed Vault began in the 1980s, but there was no international agreement then to regulate the area or support such a large effort, so the project fell by the wayside.
It was in 2004, with the entry into force of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, when there was finally a good legal basis for the creation of the Vault.
After it was decided to build the Vault in Svalbard, due to its remote location and the permafrost that covers it –seeds must be kept frozen to remain viable–, the Government of Norway studied the possible locations and finally decided to build the vault in the bowels of a mountain.
So far, only once have seeds been removed from the Vault: in October 2015, the International Center for Agricultural Research in Arid Zones (ICARDA), recovered its seeds due to the escalation of the war in Syria, which was putting The Aleppo Seed Bank is in danger.
Project website: https://seedvault.nordgen.org/
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