There are plans to open it twice more for deposits this year: once from June 6 to June 10 and again from October 24 to October 27. Fortunately, no seed samples were damaged in either event, and the facility has many safeguards in place to protect its precious contents from catastrophe.Īfter adding more seeds to its catalog, the seed vault will seal its doors again on February 18. Melting permafrost flooded the vault in 2017, and in 2020, the Svalbard archipelago where it's located hit a record high of 71☏. The 11,000-square-foot facility is built into the side of an Arctic mountain, the hope being that its remote location in the frozen tundra will spare it from wars and rising temperatures threatening plants elsewhere on the planet.īut as we've seen in recent years, the global seed bank isn't entirely impervious. The Svalbard Global Seed Bank began operating in 2008 as a physical backup drive for the world's crops. ![]() Christian Streib/CNN Behind a heavy metal door. Its collections at home have become robust enough for ICARDA to deposit around 8000 samples in the global seed vault this week. Svalbard, midway between Norway and the North Pole, was chosen as the location because it is geologically stable, and remote but accessible. The organization has since relocated from Aleppo to Beirut and rebuilt its seed stores. In 2015, ICARDA become the first group to withdraw material from the bank to replenish seeds destroyed in the Syrian War. The Lebanese contribution comes from the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas, or ICARDA. On Monday, February 14, Germany, Sudan, Uganda, New Zealand, and Lebanon sent samples of important crops to the bank on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. As Reuters reports, the Arctic fortress has been unlocked for the first time in 2022-this time to make deposits instead of withdrawals. In the northernmost town on Earth, on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault protects around 865000 seed samples from almost. On 19 June 2006, construction of the vault began when the prime ministers of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland laid the vault’s first stone. The three main industries on Svalbard are coal mining, tourism, and research. ![]() The so-called "doomsday vault" contains 1.1 million seed samples from roughly 6000 plant species that serve as insurance against natural and human-made disasters. Svalbard, where the vault is located, is situated in the Arctic Ocean. While it may sound like bad news that seeds have been removed from the so-called doomsday vault, the withdrawal actually serves as proof that such a vault is necessary, Brian Lainoff, a spokesman for the Crop Trust, told The WorldPost.In an ideal world, the Svalbard Global Seed Bank in Norway rarely has to open its doors. Related: Syria War Forces First Withdrawal from Svalbard Global Seed Vault After the war damaged its facility in Syria, ICARDA moved its headquarters to the Lebanese capital of Beirut. The storage facility is carved into solid rock some 390 feet inside the mountain, where the seeds are kept at a temperature of -18C (-0.4F), enough to significantly delay them from aging. The reclaimed seeds included varieties of wheat, barley, grass pea and other important food crops that are maintained by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), a nonprofit research organization that aims to improve the livelihoods of people in resource-poor areas across the Near East and North Africa. The Doomsday Vault, managed by the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, first opened in 2008. Buried in the side of a mountain in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, the Global Seed Vault stores virtually. As the Arctic continues to set record highs. ![]() The Global Seed Vault opened in 2008 on Svalbard, Norway, above the Arctic Circle. The Global Seed Vault, located on Norways Spitsbergen Island, took on water during the winter because of melting permafrost, according to the Guardian. Hotter summers are melting the permafrost that surrounds the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a vast facility that keeps the world’s seeds safe. The withdrawn seeds were needed to replace plant material stored in a gene bank (a facility that stores genetic material) near the war-torn city of Aleppo in Syria. There's a heatwave in Norway’s Svalbard, home to the Doomsday Vault that houses nearly 900,000 seeds for research, breeding and educational purposes. But this week, researchers in the Middle East asked to withdraw seeds that they had previously deposited into the seed bank, according to the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the international organization that manages the doomsday vault in cooperation with the Norwegian government. So far, seeds have only gone into the vault for storage, not come out.
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