Doomsday Seed Vault

More than 320,000 seed species from all over the world are now safely stored in the Norwegian permafrost at The Svalbard Global Seed Vault .The vault aims to safeguard the world's agriculture from future catastrophes, such as nuclear war, asteroid strikes and climate change.

Dr Fowler said Svalbard, 1,000km (621 miles) north of mainland Norway, was chosen as the location for the vault because it was very remote and it also offered the level of stability required for the long-term project 

At the time the Svalbard facility opened, 1,400 gene banks already existed all over the world. Many of the collections were in countries where natural disasters and shortages of resources represented a real threat to the preservation of the seeds. Storing copies of the existing collections in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault safeguards the genetic diversity of the world's food plants for future generations. 

Svalbard offers gene banks free and secure storage of seeds in a mountain vault that has a more or less infinite life expectancy. The seeds are stored at -18 degrees in the permafrost as a back-up if the original collection is lost for any reason. In other words, the seed vault acts as a safety net and it would be possible to rebuild any other gene bank in the world with seeds from Svalbard. 

The seed vault has the capacity to store 2.25 billion seeds. As well as being able to store the seeds that already exist, its also has the capacity to store seeds developed in the future. One year on from the opening, over 320,000 seed types are now deposited in Svalbard, and when the vault is operating at full capacity it will be the biggest seed collection anywhere in the world.