In an isolated part of the Norwegian Arctic, the cornerstone was laid yesterday for a bank vault of sorts.
The valuables are seeds, representing the world's agricultural diversity. The vault, to be excavated out of a sandstone on the island of Spitsbergen about 600 miles from the North Pole, will have room for 3 million samples.
It will serve as a repository of last resort if seed collections elsewhere – which are used, among other things, for research to produce disease-resistant varieties of important food crops – fail. “It's a gene bank for gene banks,” said Cary Fowler, executive secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the nonprofit group behind the effort.
There are about 1,400 seed collections around the world, but they are vulnerable to political instability, civil strife and disaster. Those are not the only problems. “The real silent killer is poor management and funding cuts,” Fowler said.
Over time, seed banks would send samples to Spitsbergen, so the vault would eventually contain duplicates of much of the world's collections. The vault will have cooling systems, but its location in a permafrost area means operating costs will be extremely low. Even if a catastrophe were to leave it without power, it would stay cool.
