By the tens of thousands, the seeds will come: strains of Mexican maize, sturdy varieties of African wheat, Southeast Asian rice that feeds the masses. They’re what one scientist calls “the crown jewels” of the world’s agricultural heritage, all of them on now getting packaged at facilities around the world for shipping to Svalbard, in the Norwegian Arctic.
Destination? What may be the world’s most secure biological archive, a climate-controlled vault blasted into solid rock and permafrost as a place to forever house samples in the event of war, drought or ecological disaster.
It’s called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, what some have started calling the Doomsday Vault. Constructed over the past year, and powered up in November by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the facility will begin its seed-protection mission in February 2008.
“Our ability to endow this facility with such an impressive array of diversity is a powerful testament to the incredible work of scientists at our centers, who have been so dedicated to ensuring the survival of the world’s most important crop species,” said Emile Frison, director general of Rome-based Bioversity International, a sponsor of the project.