Doomsday Vault: A seed vault containing millions of different seeds from around the world. Situated deep within an arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard is perhaps mankind's last hope to avert world famine.

When Bill Gates decides through the Gates Foundation to invest some $30 million of their hard earned money in a project, it is worth looking at. No project is more interesting at the moment than a curious project in one of the world's most remote spots, Svalbard. Bill Gates is investing millions in a seed bank on the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean, some 1,100 kilometers from the North Pole. Svalbard is a barren piece of rock claimed by Norway and ceded in 1925 by international treaty .

On this God-forsaken island Bill Gates is investing tens of his millions along with the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway, among others, in what is called the "doomsday seed bank." Officially the project is named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard island group.

The vault will also 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.

"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."

Security consists of:
Looming fences
Motion detectors
Steel airlock doors and
the overwhelming population of polar bears