![]() There are thought to be just under 900,000 seeds stored so far. Riccardo Gangale/Flickr CC BY-ND 2. ![]() The new upgrades will hopefully mean that the vault will continue to be able to offer such a globally important service in the future, should anything else disastrous happen. ![]() The seeds were successfully planted and grown, with a replacement shipment of the seeds sent back to Norway in 2017. Why did Norway decide to upgrade the Svalbard Global Seed Vault After 10 years of operation, the Norwegian Government decided to implement a number of. The seeds that had been stored in the Svalbard vault were withdrawn and sent to two centers – one in Morocco and the other in Lebanon – in order to rebuild a collection. Containing 155,000 varieties of crop, it was a central agricultural archive for the Fertile Crescent, one of the main hubs where farming began 10,000 years ago.Īfter being meticulously categorized, the seeds are stored away. Riccardo Gangale/Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0 In 2015 researchers withdrew seeds from the vault for the first time ever, after the civil war in Syria destroyed the main seed bank in Aleppo. If this all sounds like it might be a little over the top, well the vault has already successfully been put to use. This will include emergency power and refrigeration units, as well as a new access tunnel. New deposits are taken into the seed bank. Matthias Heyde/Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0īut the Norwegian government wants to take all the precautions they can, and have announced on the vaults 10th anniversary that they will spend $12.6 million as part of a long-term plan to improve and extend the performance of the facility. Water made it 15 meters (nearly 50 feet) down into the vault before it froze, meaning that no samples were damaged, but it did make many concerned for the future. This lead to the seed bank being flooded in 2016, after higher than average temperatures combined with a heavy rainfall. Unfortunately, when the vault was conceived, designed, and built, the engineers did not expect that climate change would begin thawing the permafrost at such a rapid rate. Millions of these tiny brown specks, from more than 930,000 varieties of food crops, are stored in the Global Seed Vault on Spitsbergen, part of Norways. The vault was originally a coal mine. Matthias Heyde/Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0 Norway will spend 100 million Norwegian Crowns (12.7 million) to upgrade the doomsday seed vault it built 10 years ago. This, they hope, will protect the world’s most significant crop varieties from any natural or manmade disaster that could strike. It will take some years to assemble because some genebanks need to multiply stocks of seed first, and other seeds need regenerating before they can be shipped to Svalbard.Built into an old coal mine on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen that plunges into the permafrost, the idea is that the permanently frozen soil keeps the samples below zero, thus preserving the seeds for up to a century. The objective of the Seed Vault is to safeguard as much of the world’s unique crop genetic material as possible, while also avoiding unnecessary duplication. In fact, the Seed Vault already holds the most diverse collection of food crop seeds in the world. These range from unique varieties of major African and Asian food staples such as maize, rice, wheat, cowpea and sorghum to European and South American varieties of eggplant, lettuce, barley and potato. (£9 million) to upgrade the vault after 10 years of use. by Charlotte Ikonen 10:55, Updated 11:04. Each packet of seeds consists of an average of 500 seeds, so a maximum of 2.5 billion seeds may be stored in the Seed Vault.Ĭurrently, the Seed Vault holds more than 1.1 million seed varieties, originating from almost every country in the world. A DOOMSDAY vault built to save humanity should a nuclear war break out will receive a massive upgrade. The Seed Vault has the capacity to store 4.5 million varieties of crops. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built to protect the worlds food stock from disasters ranging from nuclear war to global warming, will add 19,500 rare seed. Strategic Development of the Crop Trust.Darwin Initiative-funded Sweetpotato Project.Our Commitment to Responsible Investing The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a doomsday shelter for the food supply, is tucked into a remote mountain on Spitsbergen, in Norways Svalbard archipelago.What Will It Cost To Secure Global Diversity Forever?.The need to conserve crop diversity within a rational, efficient global system has been recognized in various international agreements
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