#Doomsday vault built generator#
In 2009, its professional staff left the country because of the war, but not before going to great lengths to find fuel on the black market to run a generator to freeze the seeds. An international gene bank, the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, was based in Aleppo, Syria, and had been for half a century. We stop at a box of Syrian seed samples, which had just been returned following the first withdrawal from the vault in 2015. These included sorghum, rice, barley, chickpea, lentil and wheat, along with the first ever samples from the UK: potato seeds from the James Hutton Institute in Scotland. The week before my visit, 50,000 samples of seeds from collections in Benin, India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Netherlands, the US, Mexico, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Belarus were deposited. Remote: The Global Seed Vault has been built in a mountainside cavern on the island of Svalbard, around 1000 km from the North Pole. Russia’s seeds are near those of the US, North Korea’s boxes are near to South Korea, each box with a different font, label and colour. There is rice germplasm from Africa, beans from Brazil and wheat from Mexico. At a time of geopolitical instability and weak efforts to protect the natural world, it is quite something to see a world united by 13,000 years of farming and a will to feed people of the future.
It is nothing like the Bank of England’s gold vault, with its shelves of plastic boxes in rows in an Ikea-like warehouse.īut as we walk along the rows and Brian tells the stories of some of the deposits, it is strangely moving. Brian opens the door – and for an apocalyptic stronghold, it is very small and basic. “It’s this global common good idea,” says Brian. It doesn’t cost anything for countries to store their samples here, but they have to make them available from scientists or farmers who want to try and grow a new variety. It houses 930,000 samples, with room for millions more. There are currently 700 seed banks across the world, but Svalbard is the Big Daddy. Inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (Photo: Global Crop Diversity Trust) The Big Daddy of seed banks The mastermind behind it was an American agriculturalist, Cary Fowler, who recognised that many of the world’s gene banks are vulnerable and the loss of crop diversity could be catastrophic. The vault was built 10 years ago and opened in 2008. The walls and doors are crystallised with frost, some of which feathers into beautiful geometric patterns. We walk through hollowed-out rooms and chambers, making our way to the heart of the vault. “These are the seeds that will, without a doubt, go on to feed us they will go on to create new, better crops that can resist disease and climate change.” “We are walking, right now, to the past, present and future of agriculture,” says Brian, as we step into the mountain, a young American-Italian man who’s infectiously evangelical about crop diversity.
The sea in Longyearbyen harbour, locals tell me, stopped freezing over about 10 years ago.įor now, however, you’d struggle to find a safer place to serve as a backup for the global ecological system. In the future, global warming could yet become a real threat. However, those in charge say the vault was “never at risk”. None of this helped earlier this year when it was reported that the vault had flooded when unusually high temperatures, which caused melting, and heavy rain led to some “water intrusion” near the entrance. Being hard to reach – with just two flights a day to Svalbard – provides extra security. This is desirable because the permafrost freezes the seeds, unlike gene bank collections further south that use more energy to keep cold. He’s not wrong about the temperature: it’s -18C. “The most obvious reason for this location is because it’s pretty damn cold,” says Brian Lainoff, of the Crop Trust, which manages the vault.
Seeds of life: new seeds are regularly introduced to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault’s collection (Photo: JUNGE, HEIKO/AFP/Getty Images) A frosty reception Polar bears almost outnumber people here. A few miles to the east is Longyearbyen, a small town and the only settlement in the vast, snow-covered wilderness. Across the fjord here in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, pink sunlight hits the peaks of ice-covered mountains. They could hardly have found a more remote place to build it than on this mountain inside the Arctic Circle.
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