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Facts To Know About the Global Seed Vault

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, also known as the "doomsday vault," is regarded as humanity's last hope against extinction following a global crisis. Though its mission is to protect the world's seeds, its creation was not intended to reseed the world after a global disaster.

Cary Fowler, a scientist, conservationist, and biodiversity advocate, created the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Despite the fact that there are over 1,700 genebanks around the world that keep seed collections, they are all vulnerable to war, natural disasters, equipment malfunctions, and other issues. In 2003, Fowler began to imagine a backup storage facility where all of the world's seeds could be safely stored.

Fowler's vision was realized in 2008 when the Global Seed Vault was carved nearly 500 feet (152 meters) into the side of a mountain. The first withdrawal from the seed vault occurred in 2015 as a result of the Syrian war. The seeds were used to replace those that had been damaged in a gene bank near the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo. In 2016, Fowler published the book "Seeds on Ice: Svalbard and the Global Seed Vault."

Location

The Svalbard Global Seed Bank is located in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago (a group of islands in the Arctic Ocean). According to the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food, Svalbard is located north of mainland Europe, halfway between continental Norway and the North Pole.

"None of these reasons for locating the facility in Norway would have sufficed had it not been for the fact that Svalbard offers almost perfect conditions: it is remote and thus safer than other possible locations, and it is naturally cold. We wanted to have a facility that would stay naturally frozen without the aid of mechanical freezing equipment. Inside the mountain in the permafrost, we get steady below-freezing temperatures. We mechanically lower the temperature further to about minus 18 C [0 F], but this is much easier to accomplish when you start at -5 C [23 F] rather than above freezing."

The Svalbard Global Seed Bank is located in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago (a group of islands in the Arctic Ocean). According to the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food, Svalbard is located north of mainland Europe, halfway between continental Norway and the North Pole.

Preservation

In addition to being kept at 0 degrees Fahrenheit, the seeds are sealed in three-ply foil packages, which are then sealed inside boxes. These boxes are stored on shelves inside the Vault, where temperature and humidity levels are closely monitored. This process reduces metabolic activity in the seeds, allowing them to survive for long periods of time.

The Vault's function

Though the Vault is thought to be a "doomsday vault" that will provide seeds for the world after a global disaster, this is not the case.

"The seeds are not intended for distribution to farmers or gardeners," Fowler explained. "Their worth and utility stem from their use as a genetic resource in plant breeding. As a result, they are ultimately intended to benefit plant breeders and other scientists involved in the development of new crop varieties for farmers. Consider the seeds to be a collection of traits, or, more broadly, a collection of future options for our crops, such as disease and pest resistance, drought and heat tolerance, improved nutrition, and so on."

The Vault, and other vaults around the world, can also be used to preserve historical plant species. According to National Geographic(opens in new tab), approximately 90% of historic fruit and vegetable varieties in the United States have vanished. The seed vault will keep these seeds safe for future generations.

The Global Seed Vault, on the other hand, is intended to assist other banks.

"The seeds in the Seed Vault are duplicate copies of collections held in national and other seedbanks worldwide," Fowler explained. "If something happens to one of those facilities, and their seed samples are destroyed, a backup copy is stored in the Seed Vault. Previously, the extinction of a variety meant the extinction of that variety and any unique trait it might have contained. Today, fires, floods, natural disasters, war, human error, accidents, and funding cuts do not have to result in crop extinction. If it's in the Seed Vault, it's as secure as it can be."

Capacity

Massive amounts of seeds can be stored in the Global Seed Vault. It is designed to store 4.5 million crop varieties, with each variety containing approximately 500 seeds. According to the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an international organization that works with the Norwegian government to manage the seeds in the Vault, this equates to a maximum of 2.5 billion seeds that can be stored in the Vault. As of this writing, the Vault contains over 860,000 seed samples. Because these seeds were donated by almost every country on the planet, the Global Seed Vault contains a huge variety of seeds.

"Despite the fact that I've been working in this field for nearly 40 years, I think the biggest surprise was the breadth of diversity that came in from seedbanks all over the world," Fowler said. "I anticipated a lot of rice and wheat (we have more than 150,000 distinct varieties of each). What I didn't expect to see were seeds from so many different crops. A list of the crops represented in the Vault runs about 55 pages when printed single-spaced. Rice and wheat are divided into two lines. I admit that I had never heard of 'cheesy toes,' 'Asian pigeonwings,' or 'zombie peas,' but we have all of these and much more."

Donations and seed collection

There are some guidelines for donations and seed retrieval at the Global Seed Vault. First, they only accept donations from the Multilateral System, which is part of an international treaty on food resources or seeds that originated in the depositor's country.

The Multilateral System is a provision of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture that governs the sharing of plant genetics. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the treaty ensures that countries can freely share the genetic information of 64 crops that account for 80 percent of all human consumption through seed banks. Those who use the information and discover new information must agree to share the information or contribute a percentage of the money they earn from their research to a common fund.