Have you heard the news? Norway opened a frozen "doomsday" vault Tuesday, Feb. 26, deep within an Arctic mountain where millions of seeds will be stored to safeguard against wars or natural disasters wiping out food crops around the globe.
"This is a frozen Garden of Eden," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said, standing in one of the frosty vaults against a backdrop of large discs made of ice.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg called the vault an "insurance policy" and added his own biblical comparison: "It is the Noah's Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations."
Svalbard Global Seed Vault, just 620 miles from the North Pole, is designed to house as many as 4.5 million crop seeds from all over the world. It is built to withstand global warming, earthquakes and even nuclear strikes.
The vault, built by the Norwegian government for $9.1 million, will operate like a bank box. Norway owns the bank, but the countries depositing seeds own them and can used them as needed free of charge.
Daily operations will be overseen by NorGen, a gene bank in an old coal mine on Svalbard that is jointly owned by the Nordic countries.
The vault will serve as a backup to the other 1,400 seed banks around the world, in case their deposits are lost. War wiped out seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and another bank in the Philippines was flooded in the wake of a typhoon in 2006.
"It is very important for Africa to store seeds here because anything can happen to our national seed banks," said 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai of Kenya. She is a board member of Global Crop Diversity Trust board, which collects the seeds for the Svalbard vault.
"Crop diversity will soon prove to be our most potent and indispensable resource for addressing climate change, water and energy supply constraints, and for meeting the food needs of a growing population," said Cary Fowler, head of the trust.
Stoltenberg and Maathai made the first deposit in the vault - a box of rice seeds from 104 countries. Guests at the ceremony carried dozens of other boxes through the steel and concrete-lined tunnel leading to the vaults.
The seeds are packed in silvery foil containers - as many as 500 in each sample - and placed on blue and orange metal shelves inside three 32-by-88-foot storage chambers. Each vault can hold 1.5 million sample packages of all types of crop seeds, from carrots to wheat.
Svalbard is cold, but giant air conditioning units have chilled the vault further to -0.4 degrees, a temperature at which experts say many seeds could last for 1,000 years.The significant public interest in the seed vault project indicates that collectively we are changing the way we think about environmental conservation. We now understand that along with international movements to save endangered species and the rainforests of the world, it is just as important for us to conserve the diversity of the world's crops for future generations," Maathai said.

"The opening of the seed vault marks a historic turning point in safeguarding the world's crop diversity,'' said Fowler. "But about 50 percent of the unique diversity stored in seed banks still is endangered. We are in the midst of trying to rescue these varieties. Our success means we will guarantee the conservation and availability of these wildly diverse crops. Forever."

Unique Building

The building of the vault itself has attracted much outside interest due to its location and its unusual engineering, security, and aesthetic features. Its engineering allows it to stay cool with only a single 10-kilowatt compressor, which is powered by locally generated electricity.
The number of seeds stored will depend on the number of countries participating in the project. The project aims to prevent needed plants from going extinct or becoming rare if a nuclear war were to break out, because of gene pollution from genetically engineered plants, or due to disease or global warming.

"Every day that passes we lose crop biodiversity. We must conserve the seeds that will allow agriculture to adapt to challenges such as climate change and crop disease," said Dr. Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which will co-fund the vault's operations and pay for the preparation and transport of seeds from all developing nations to Svalbard.

Svalbard is a group of islands nearly 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) north of mainland Norway. Svalbard's airport is the northernmost point in the world to be serviced by scheduled flights - usually one a day. For nearly four months a year the islands are wrapped in total darkness.

The site was chosen, in part, because the ground is perpetually frozen, providing natural back-up refrigeration that would preserve the seeds should electricity fail. Yet, even here, project architects had to consider how to offset the potential impacts of climate change.

The design will accommodate even worst-case scenarios of global warming in two main ways. For one, the vault will be located high above any possible rise in sea level caused by global warming. The vault will be located some 130 meters (426 feet) above current sea level, ensuring that it will not be flooded.

This puts it well above a seven meter (23 foot) rise that would accompany the melting of Greenland's ice sheet, or even a 61 meter (200 foot) rise that could accompany an unlikely total meltdown of Antarctica.

It's located some 700 miles from the North Pole, buried hundreds of feet deep in rock and ice, safe and secure from intruders, natural disasters and even military attack! What's inside? Hundreds of millions of seeds from more than 100 countries, all assembled and kept safe to protect the world's fragile food supply.

* Svalbard, Norway, the site of the vault, is actually part of a collection of ice-covered islands. They're due north of Europe, and among the last bits of land before the North Pole.
* The vault cost $9 million to build and there are 1,500,000,000 seeds from nearly every nation locked inside. It was built to last 10,000 years.
* Norway paid for construction of the vault, while Microsoft founder Bill Gates paid to ship the seeds.
* Each country owns and has access to the seeds they have deposited.
* Its official name is "The Svalbard Global Seed Vault" and it has a maximum capacity of 2,250,000,000 seeds.
* The seeds are stored at a temperature of zero degrees Fahrenheit.

Backup plan

The cavern will act as a backup storage for seeds from gene banks around the world.

Initially, 100 million seeds from more than 100 countries have been sent for safekeeping at the $10m facility which holds 268,000 distinct seed samples, each from a different farm or field.

Stoltenberg said the vault, would guard "the fundamental building blocks of human civilisation" from forces, including climate change, threatening the "diversity of life that sustain our planet".

The Norwegian prime minister and Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist and 2004 Nobel peace prize winner, put the first box of seeds in the vault at an inauguration ceremony.

The 'Doomsday' vault's seed deposits range from major African and Asian staples such as rice, maize, wheat, cowpea and sorghum to European and South American varieties of eggplant, lettuce, barley and potato.

'Frozen Garden of Eden'

"We will have a major [seed] collection here, one of the biggest in the world, from the opening day," Cary Fowler, head of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is funding the operations of the vault, said.

"We are going to put an end to extinction with this vault because we are going to have a safety backup, a Plan B."

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Here's one for tips on keeping "Fido" or "Fluffy" safe during a disaster:
The Cat Fanciers' Association~Disaster Preparedness