Norway To Build Arctic "Doomsday Vault" To House Seed Bank

[hatrack]

Norway is to build a "doomsday vault" in a mountain close to the North Pole that will house a vast seed bank to ensure food supplies in the event of catastrophic climate change, nuclear war or rising sea levels, New Scientist says. Built with Fort Knox-type security, the three-million-dollar vault will be designed to hold around two million seeds representing all known varieties of the world's crops.

They are the precious food plants that have emerged from 10,000 years of selection by farmers. The facility "would essentially be built to last forever," according to a feasibility study. It will be built deep in permafrost in the side of a sandstone mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, 1,000 kilometers (625 miles) from the North Pole, the British weekly says in its next issue, out on Saturday. With walls of one-metre- (3.25-feet-) thick concrete, the seed bank will be protected behind two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors.

The facility will not be permanently manned but "the mountains are patrolled by polar bears," the report quotes Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an organisation that is promoting the project, as saying. To be preserved, the seeds must be kept below freezing point. Operators plan to replace the air inside the vault once a year at winter-time, but even if for some reason this becomes impossible, the permafrost will still keep the seeds viable.

The thick walls, airlocks and doors mean that even if global warming accelerates badly, it would take many decades for hotter air to reach the seeds. "This will be the world's most secure gene bank by some orders of magnitude," said Fowler. "But its seeds will only be used when all other samples have gone for some reason. It is a fail-safe depository, rather than a conventional seed bank."

EDIT

http://www.terradaily.com/news/Doomsday_Vault_To_House_Worlds_Seeds.html

Call me crazy, but if they're relying on permafrost and polar bears, their faith in security and climate control may be sadly misplaced.

[SnoopDog]

1. It is nice to know there are some intelligent people on earth...

... who care enough to perpetuate our life... instead of the actually killing and destroying of people and our planet.

[Lerkfish]

2. they better get crackin!

doomsday clock is tickin.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

3. I guarantee: Squirrels will still get in there.

[htuttle]

4. Maybe they should put it in orbit instead

[phantom power]

5. If things get that bad, we may not have any space program.

And, it can get plenty hot in space. I was thinking Antarctica, although who knows if we could make it there either, if things got really bad.

[hunter]

7. Those long nights in Antarctica can make you crazy...

... even if it's warm outside.

:yoiks:

[NNadir]

6. Of course, if it comes to this, the scale of tragedy will be unimaginable.

On the other hand, I, of course, am pretty well convinced that an unimaginable tragedy is about to happen.

[Dead_Parrot]

8. That's a shame...

Since they're going to all this trouble, it would be nice if they found a bit more space for other types of plant, rather than just the financially viable and edible ones (I recall being pleasantly surprised that NZ had an animal DNA bank, only to find it was for interesting breeds of sheep. Should've guessed, really).

The only "wild plant" DNA banks I know of are the ones in the UK and Brazil, and I've a horrible feeling we're going to need a lot more...