The Svalbard Seed Vault
Have you ever wondered what the most important refrigerator in the world is? Well, take a quick trip just northeast of Greenland (which is way too big in the map below thanks to the Mercator Projection), and you’ll arrive at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault — one of the most unique, and perhaps important places on earth.
The Svalbard Seed Vault is a secure vault designed to store seeds from all major crops around the world in a place that will keep them safe, even in the midst of global crises or wars. The idea is that humanity always has a place to restart its food crops from, no matter what happens.
The vault was founded in 2008 as a collaboration between the Norwegian government (Svalbard is technically part of Norway) and the Crop Trust, an international nonprofit which aims to preserve biodiversity to protect global food security. The vault cost about 10 million to build, and was funded primarily by the Trust and the various contributors to it (such as the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation).
This is one tough vault
The Svalbard seed vault was built to protect the seeds inside even in the case of major international disasters. It is built inside of a sandstone mountain on Spitsbergen island, which was chosen for a few reasons. First, Spitsbergen island has very little tectonic activity. Second, island has permafrost, meaning that even if the facility lost all electricity for extended periods of time, the seeds inside the vault (which goes 120 meters into the mountain) would remain at approximately -3 degrees celsius, which is the temperature of the surrounding permafrost. Third, the mountain is high enough that even if the polar ice caps completely melted, the vault would still be above sea level.
It is believed that the above factors mean that, even in the absence of any human activity whatsoever, the vault could keeps most seeds biologically capable for hundreds or, in some cases, thousands of years.
The Seed Vault By the Numbers
The seed vault can store a total of 4.5 million seed samples, where each sample is a bag of around 500 seeds stored in an airtight aluminum bag. In general, each bag consists of the same species of seeds, because having a large number of each seed ensures that each species has enough genetic diversity stored that the seeds could reliably revive the species’ population.
As of 2017, the vault has ~950,000 samples stored out of its 4.5 million sample capacity. The current set of seeds stored in the vault represent about one third of all genus stored in seed vaults worldwide.
Using the Seed Vault
The seed vault operates exactly like a bank’s safety deposit system. That is, countries and scientific organizations around the world can send a request to store their seeds in the vault. Assuming the request is approved, the depositor signs a contract with Norway stating that they are depositing a certain set of seeds. (there are some policies, like that the seeds can’t be for plants like marijuana, so RIP stoners if the world falls apart and we need to restart from the seed vault)
Ownership of the seeds remains entirely in the hands of the depositor, meaning that the only party that has access to any seeds in the vault is the party that deposited those seeds. In fact, it is not even possible for Norway or the people who manage the seed vault to open most of the seed boxes in the vault. Norway and the Crop Trust merely keep track of what seeds were deposited by what people, and operate the facility.
Evidently, the seed vault does get a few strange requests for deposits every now and again. For instance, in the video below (which is a cool video that shows someone walking through the vault), the woman who manages the vault explains that they get quite a few requests from men who wish to deposit their semen. Sadly, the Svalbard Vault does not accept such requests.
Not so impenetrable after all?
Despite the proclaimed safety of the seed vault, a recent event has put into question just how secure this vault really is. Record temperatures in the Arctic in 2017 led to some portions of the permafrost on the island melting, and the resulting water actually partially flooded the vault. Luckily, the water did not reach the inner vault, and the seeds were totally safe, but the entrance to the vault was heavily iced over as the melted permafrost re-froze and made the entrance like a glacier.
While vault operators are now working to better waterproof the vault, this incidence demonstrated just how impactful the effects of global warming have become, and just how important it is that we continue to fight it.
