The future of humanity may soon rest deep in a frozen mountain on a remote Norwegian island.
The Norwegian government plans to build a ”doomsday vault” to house two million seeds that represent the entire agricultural diversity of the planet. The idea is to safeguard the world’s food supply against threats such as nuclear war, asteroid impact, terror attack, climate change and rising sea levels.
”It’s a Noah’s ark for seeds,” said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, who carried out a feasibility study on the project. ”It would be used to re-establish agriculture.”
The precise location has not been decided, but it will be close to Longyearbyen on Svalbaard, well inside the Arctic Circle. The vault, measuring 5mx5mx15m, will be cut from solid rock in the side of a mountain and should be finished by September next year.
The £1,7-million cost is being put up by Norway, which will own the facility, but technically not the seeds inside.
”It’s a gift to humanity,” said Fowler. ”It’s a fairly cheap insurance policy, given the importance of agriculture.”
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that 75% of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops has already been lost.
”This will be the world’s most secure gene bank by some orders of magnitude,” he told New Scientist magazine. ”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.” — Â