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From the outside, it may look like a refuge for mountaineers, but this intriguing bunker in Norway is, in fact, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, roughly 1,120 kilometres from the North Pole, it was built in 2006 to protect as many varieties of agricultural seeds as possible. The goal is to assure that the cultivation of these crops can be continued even following epidemics, natural disasters, or war, as was the case when Aleppo, in Syria, was attacked in 2015. After the conflict subsided, the city withdrew seeds it had previously deposited with the vault.
To maintain these seeds under ideal conditions, it’s not possible to simply store them in any ordinary building. This specially designed vault is managed by the Norwegian government, the Crop Trust, and NordGen, a sustainable use organization which is a partnership of the five Nordic countries. An isolated location was chosen for the highly secure vault and it was built with very specific conditions in mind for the seeds. The facility now protects the seeds that represent some 12,000 years of agricultural development.
Prior to the construction of the current vault, there were two other seed banks run by the same organisations. Frozen seeds were stored in an abandoned coal mine (also on the island of Spitsbergen) and in another location in South Africa. They were brought together in 2006 in the current vault designed by Norwegian architect Peter W. Söderman. Dug 120 metres deep into a mountain, it consists of a 100-metre corridor with three vast rooms providing over 16,000 square feet of storage space. The seeds are sealed in special packets designed to prevent mould.
The island of Spitsbergen was chosen because of its lack of tectonic activity and the quality of its permafrost (the soil is permanently frozen at -18 degrees), helping to create ideal conservation conditions. Most of the seeds in the vault could survive for several hundred or even thousands of years. “It's a bit like being in a cathedral,” Lise Lykke Steffensen, executive director of NordGen, the gene bank responsible for daily operations of the bunker, told The Guardian. “It has high ceilings and when you’re standing inside the mountain, there’s hardly any sound. All you can hear is yourself.”
Every decade or so, the seeds are replaced with new ones to ensure they remain viable. Each country that deposits seeds retains ownership of their contributions. The seed bank holds over a million samples from all over the world, from potatoes to aubergines, and barley to maize. The aim is to be able to preserve them if they were to disappear due to natural disasters or global warming, earning it the nickname “a Noah’s Ark for plants,” or the “Doomsday Vault.” It can hold up to 4.5 million varieties of seeds and it opens its doors just once a year, when it welcomes new seeds.
“As the rate of climate change and biodiversity loss increases, there’s a new urgency when it comes to efforts to save endangered food crops," explains Stefan Schmitz, director of the Crop Trust, another organization involved in the management of the vault. “The number of seeds deposited in the vault today reflection a growing global commitment to conserving and also developing the crop diversity that is crucial to farmers as they attempt to adapt to changing growing conditions.”
The bunker in Norway upon which the survival of humanity may one day depend is facing a number of significant challenges, not least among them the impact of climate change. In 2016, moisture was entering the vault thanks to the melting of the permafrost, which is, as its name implies, never supposed to thaw. Given, however, that the Arctic has been warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet in recent years, it’s not that surprising. Fortunately, it should take several hundred years for the temperature to rise above 0 degrees consistently—a situation that would pose a significant challenge for the bunker. A second challenge is related to the funding of the seed bank. While the Nordic states still provide most of the funding for the project, contributing 72% of the budget, other players including private companies who contribute 5% and potentially have leverage to influence the vault’s decisions around operations. There is concern in particular about Syngenta, a Chinese company that’s a world leader in the production of agrochemicals. The remaining funding comes from other organisations and foundations like the UN and the Gates Foundation.
