Deeper and down

Deep inside a mountain on the island of Spitzbergen within the Arctic Circle, the world's first Global Seed Vault was launched last month as the ultimate in safe repository for plant material from seed stores around the world that may be subject to climate change or other unpredictable catastrophies. Every nation has been invited by the Norwegian government to place seeds in its vault. The seeds will remain the property of the country that deposited them. The $8 million project, spearheaded by Norway, involved sinking shafts more than 100 metres into rock on the Svalbard peninsula on this Norwegian island, where the climate makes it easier to keep the vault at –18ºC to help preserve the seeds. The entry, a narrow triangular portal made of concrete and steel, sticks out of the mountainside above the Arctic Sea. Inside, a 120 m reinforced concrete tunnel slopes into the heart of the mountain towards three chambers, each measuring a volume of 1,500 cubic metres. At the opening ceremony, the first 250,000 samples were placed in the vault, with more following soon. The focus for the vault will be on seeds from food crops, with the estimate Features that there are 2–3 million different varieties of food crops in the world. Although the Svalbard vault is not the world's first refuge of endangered plant stocks — there are an estimated 1,400 government and private seed banks — Svalbard has been designed to provide a backup for them all with the best position and conditions to ensure long-term survival. It was built by the Norwegian government and is run by a United Nations-sponsored foundation called the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT). One of the worries that drove the project is the increasing use in industrial agriculture of fewer and fewer varieties of crop, increasing their vulnerability to disastrous events. Historically, humans have used around Archiving life: Seeds are now arriving for storage at a resource that hopes to preserve them from the threat of climate change and environmental damage for future generations to use. Nigel Williams reports. Deep north: The Global Seed Vault, which opened last month on the Svalbard peninsula of Spitzbergen in the Arctic Circle, will act as a world repository for plant seeds. (Picture: AFP/Getty Images.)