The Global Seed Vault at the Svalbard archipelago is about to get some upgrades, Norway announced. Almost a decade since the vault opened, it now houses more than 850,000 seed samples donated by nations from all over the world for safekeeping.
Fans of
real-time space strategy game Stellaris may be familiar with a moment in the
game when an elder alien civilization volunteers to “preserve” your in-game
species by curating some of your adult population into vaults. Well, in real
life, there’s actually something quite similar to this — except it’s not meant
for preserving fully grown sentient species.
On an island
by the Arctic boundaries of Norway, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) has
been keeping seeds samples from every part of the world since 2008 — just in
case. This “doomsday vault” serves as a huge cold-storage unit for more than
850,000 seed samples, according to the Public Radio Institute, which are kept
at about -18 °C (-3 °F). It serves as a backup for the other 1,750 seed banks
all over the planet, each designed for food security.
Perhaps
you’re wondering if this seed vault has ever been useful. Well, in 2015, some
116,000 seed samples in the SGSV were transferred to a seed bank in Aleppo that
had been damaged by the recent Syrian Civil War. Two years later, the seeds
were grown and new samples were sent back for storage at the SGSV.
To ensure
that the SGSV can continue to provide such aid in times of crisis, it will soon
be getting much-needed upgrades worth almost $13 million (100 million NOK),
according to Norway’s Agriculture Ministry. Sometime late in 2016, the seed
vault was damaged by an unexpected permafrost thaw, which caused flooding into
the vault’s tunnel entrance.
“The project
includes the construction of a new, concrete-built access tunnel, as well as a
service building to house emergency power and refrigerating units and other
electrical equipment that emits heat through the tunnel,” the government
stated.
It’s been a
decade since the vault had been constructed, so it’s really due for some
upgrades. These will allow the SGSV to continue preserving humanity’s food
supplies, as Norwegian agriculture and food minister Jon Georg Dale said.
It “will
ensure that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault can continue to offer the world’s
gene banks a secure storage space in the future,” Dale explained in the
government statement. “It is a great and important task to safeguard all the
genetic material that is crucial to global food security.”
References:
Reuters Science, Norwegian Government Website
Via Futurism.
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