svalbard global seed vault

By Johnny Wood What better place to build a Doomsday Vault than the remote, snow-covered islands of Norway’s Arctic Svalbard? Sitting around 1,000 kilometers from the North Pole, the facility is buried in permafrost to protect the precious seed samples housed there. But a freak heatwave is causing the region’s ice to melt. Following several […]

By Eoin Higgins Just over a decade after it first opened, the world’s “doomsday vault” of seeds is imperiled by climate change as the polar region where it’s located warms faster than any other area on the planet. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which opened in late February 2008, was built by the organization Crop […]

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic Circle—also known as the “doomsday vault” safeguarding the world’s most diverse collection of seeds—now holds 1,059,646 unique crop varieties after receiving more than 70,000 samples on Monday. Depositors from 23 seed banks around the world braved sub-zero temperatures to deliver duplicate seeds of vital staples such as […]

Flooding breached a supposedly impregnable Arctic “doomsday” vault containing a collection of seeds stored for an apocalypse scenario last week, after warmer-than-average temperatures caused a layer of permafrost to thaw. Buried into a hillside on the Norwegian archipelago, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault contains more than 930,000 different varieties of seeds intended to ensure the […]

A major seed deposit critical to ensuring global food security was made to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic Circle on Wednesday. Despite a backdrop of geopolitical volatility, nearly 50,000 samples of seeds from seed collections in Benin, India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Netherlands, the U.S, Mexico, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus and the […]