11/28/2023 0 Comments Arctic doomsday vault wikiThe initiative began in the 1980’s when the Nordic Gene Bank began collecting frozen seeds in an abandoned coal mine in Spitsbergen as a backup storage facility. The seed vault is built 150m into the side of Platåberget mountain, just a few kilometres from the primary settlement of Longyearbyen. The largest island, Spitsbergen, hosts the majority of the territory’s population-just under 3000 people-most of whom work in coal mining or scientific research. Svalbard is a series of islands in the Arctic Ocean, midway between the northern tip of Norway and the North Pole. 14 years on, the colloquially named ‘Doomsday Vault’ houses more than 1 million distinct plant samples, with rigorous safeguarding and security protocols in place to ensure that nothing and nobody can compromise it. Food scarcity and the eradication of species are two of the biggest issues unfolding as the consequences of the changing climate are becoming more and more drastic, threatening much of the world’s biodiversity.Īs a response to this worldwide concern, and with a view to preserve as much of our present-day diversity as possible, in 2008 the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) was officially opened. With the purported end of the world being predicted every few years, future-proofing global resources has become a greater priority-particularly where biologists are concerned. Svalbard was originally an independent whaling base, until it became incorporated into the Kingdom of Norway in the early 20th century. But yes, it’s true-just south of the 80th parallel on the Svalbard archipelago is a ‘genetic resource’ stronghold-The Svalbard Global Seed Vault. All rights reserved.It’s not a bomb shelter, nor is it straight out of an episode of Doomsday Preppers. It brought the total deposits in the snow-covered vault-with a capacity of 4.5 million-to 940,000. The 50,000 samples deposited Wednesday were from seed collections in Benin, India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Morocco, Netherlands, the U.S., Mexico, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus and Britain. "The reconstituted seeds will play a critical role in developing climate-resilient crops for generations," Abousabaa said. The agency borrowed the seeds three years ago because it could not access its gene bank of 141,000 specimens in the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo, and so was unable to regenerate and distribute them to breeders and researchers. and Mexico, have been deposited in the world's largest repository, built to safeguard against wars or natural disasters wiping out global food crops. Nearly 10 years after a "doomsday" seed vault opened on an Arctic island off Norway, some 50,000 new samples from seed collections ranging from India, the Middle East, northern Africa and Europe to the U.S. 2016 file photo of the interior of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the secure seed bank on Svalbard, Norway. Speaking from Svalbard, Aly Abousabaa, the head of the International Center for Agricultural Research, said Thursday that borrowing and reconstituting the seeds before returning them had been a success and showed that it was possible to "find solutions to pressing regional and global challenges." The specimens consisted of seed samples for some of the world's most vital food sources like potato, sorghum, rice, barley, chickpea, lentil and wheat. They were the first to retrieve seeds from the vault in 2015 before returning new ones after multiplying and reconstituting them. The latest specimens sent to the bank, located on the Svalbard archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, included more than 15,000 reconstituted samples from an international research center that focuses on improving agriculture in dry zones. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a gene bank built underground on the isolated island in a permafrost zone some 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the North Pole, was opened in 2008 as a master backup to the world's other seed banks, in case their deposits are lost.
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