The Svalbard Global Seed Vault
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault celebrated its one year anniversary on February 26th. Never heard of this vault? Well, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is is a secure seedbank located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. This $9 million facility was built last year in order to preserve a variety of plant seeds from locations worldwide in an underground cavern. The Seed Vault contains duplicate samples of seeds held in genebanks worldwide. This is also a refuge for seeds in the case of large scale regional or global crises. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault’s mission is to provide a safety net against accidental loss of diversity in traditional genebanks.
What I did not know is that almost every country has a national seed bank, and Svalbard is the place to store the samples from all of these seed banks. On February 26th, they celebrated by receiving 90,000 new samples, or four tons, of seeds. They now have over 400,000 seed samples located in this “vault.” Officials have estimated that there are approximately 1.5 million distinct seed samples of agricultural crops in existence. This facility has the capacity to conserve 4.5 million different seeds.
The seedbank is constructed about 400 feet inside a sandstone mountain at Svalbard on Spitsbergen Island. Why Spitsbergen? Well, apparently Spitsbergen lacks in tectonic activity and permafrost–two factors that will aid in preservation. It is located about 400 feet above sea level, so they hope that this ensures that the site will remain dry even if the icecaps melt. If all of the equipment fails inside the vault, then everything should remain frozen for several weeks and the temperature should not rise past -3 degrees Celsius, or 30 degrees Fahrenheit.
Constructing the seed vault was funded entirely by the Government of Norway, and storage of seeds in the seed vault is free of charge. Surprisingly to me, all of the operational costs are also paid by Norway and the Global Crop Diversity Trust. With this seedbank, we should be able to save and preserve plants for hundreds and perhaps even thousands of years.
