Norway Building Doomsday Seed Vault
Posted on January 13, 2006
The BBC reports that Norway is building a doomsday seed vault designed to withstand nuclear war in an effort to save "all known varities" of the world's crops.
"What will go into the cave is a copy of all the material that is currently in collections [spread] all around the world," Geoff Hawtin of the Trust told the BBC's Today programme.The Global Crop Diversity Trust is organizing the seed collection. A New Scientist article about vault says it is designed to hold over 2 million seeds. New Scientist also says the vault will be built on a "freezing-cold island" located near the North Pole.Mr Hawtin said there were currently about 1,400 seed banks around the world, but a large number of these were located in countries that were either politically unstable or that faced threats from the natural environment.
"What we're trying to do is build a back-up to these, so that a sample of all the material in these gene banks can be kept in the gene bank in Spitsbergen," Mr Hawtin added.
The Norwegian government is due to start work on the seed vault next year, when it will drill into a sandstone mountain on Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard archipelago, about 966km (600 miles) from the North Pole.