You couldn’t just show up and loiter with intent. It is not permanently staffed, though it is constantly monitored and the seeds are housed behind at least five locked doors.

It is meant to last a thousand years or more. It is simple, relatively cheap to run, and designed to withstand physical calamity and human interference.

It is a hole in a mountain, a tunnel that extends a few hundred feet and terminates in three chambers, each 90 feet long, 30 feet wide and 16 feet high. In part, the Svalbard vault is best understood by what it is not: It is not a vast subterranean laboratory staffed with the world’s boffins in white coats, a la CERN or a James Bond movie. Climate change poses another tangible threat, as extreme weather events, rising waters and shifts in temperatures require the development of new varieties to handle the challenges. If a new disease or pest were to wipe out a strain of wheat, for example, it’s probable that the germ plasm at Svalbard could be used to breed in resistance. The seeds come from the existing seed banks in 233 countries, and they are insurance against the loss of an irreplaceable crop to something as unexciting as a budget crisis in a poor country (or a rich one) to, yes, a cataclysmic nuclear war.Įach seed has its own genetic makeup, and the value of these stocks is in their DNA. The vault today houses more than half a billion seeds representing 881,473 unique varieties of plants used to feed people. Its natural year-round temperature is minus-5 degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit), but the air is further cooled to the optimum storage temperature of minus-18 degrees Celsius (zero degrees F). Fowler hopes the book will dispel a more mainstream misapprehension: that this is a doomsday vault, a time capsule to unlock after a nuclear Armageddon.Ĭary Fowler in the main seed vault.

Svalbard’s beguiling paradox of fame and mystery inevitably has spawned various wacky conspiracy theories, including the idea that the vault is a top-secret NATO facility housing a global eugenics project. The book is called “ Seeds on Ice,” and if you’re still looking for a gift for the gardener or gourmet in your life, this would work handsomely. Bauhaus meets Valhalla.įowler, with principal photographer Mari Tefre, has just written a book on the vault that lifts the veil on the place - it’s not open to the public even though it quickly became the second most recognized structure in Norway. Almost nine years after it was built, the seed vault has taken on a mythic quality around the world, perhaps because its entrance - stark, geometric, bejeweled by a light sculpture by Norwegian artist Dyveke Sanne - hints at something not just hidden but forbidden. It is precisely this remoteness and coldness that led scientist Cary Fowler and his colleagues at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, now known as the Crop Trust, to persuade the Norwegian government to locate the vault there. This beguiling structure juts out from a mountain near the town of Longyearbyen, which is reputed to be the northernmost permanent settlement on Earth and a place where residents must go about their business with rifles slung over their backs, on account of the polar bears. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is not exactly at the North Pole, but it’s nearer to it than just about anywhere else, and well inside the Arctic Circle on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

Government doomsday vault