Doomsday Seed Vault Opens

The so-called “doomsday” seed vault opened recently in Norway. It’s a remarkable venture — and an even more remarkable piece of engineering:

“This is a frozen Garden of Eden,” European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said at the opening ceremony Tuesday, as guests carried the first seed deposits into the icy vault, deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

“It is the Noah’s Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations,” said Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.

Svalbard Global Seed Vault, just 1,000 kilometers (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 warning, earthquakes and even nuclear strikes.

It will serve as a backup for the other 1,400 seed banks around the world, in case their deposits are hit by disasters, economic collapse, war or climate change.

For example, war wiped out seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and one in the Philippines was flooded in the wake of a typhoon in 2006.

“This is unique. This is very visionary. It is a precaution for the future,” said 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai of Kenya. She is a board member of Crop Diversity Trust, which collects the seeds for the Svalbard vault.

The trust was founded by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and Biodiversity International, a Rome-based research group.

“It is very important for Africa to store seeds here because anything can happen to our national seed banks,” Maathai said, bundled up against the cold.

Stoltenberg and Maathai made the first deposit in the vault — a box of rice seeds from 104 countries.

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 10-by-27-meter (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.

One hopes, of course, that the doomsday vault will never be needed, but it’s still good to know it’s there — and that the seeds within it can be stored safely for more than a millenium.