Doomsday Vault To House World's Seeds

January 20, 2006

" Doomsday Vault " To House World's Seeds

Aerial view of Spitsbergen island.Paris (AFP) Jan 11, 2006

Norway is to build a " doomsday vault " in a mountain close to the North Pole that

will house a vast seed bank to ensure food supplies in the event of catastrophic

climate change, nuclear war or rising sea levels, New Scientist says. Built

with Fort Knox-type security, the three-million-dollar vault will be designed to

hold around two million seeds representing all known varieties of the world's

crops. They are the precious food plants that have emerged from 10,000 years

of selection by farmers. The facility " would essentially be built to last

forever, " according to a feasibility study. It will be built deep in

permafrost in the side of a sandstone mountain on the Norwegian island of

Spitsbergen, 1,000 kilometers (625 miles) from the North Pole, the British

weekly says in its next issue, out on Saturday. With walls of one-metre-

(3.25-feet-) thick concrete, the seed bank will be protected behind two airlocks

and high-security blast-proof doors. The facility will not be

permanently manned but " the mountains are patrolled by polar bears, " the report

quotes Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an organisation

that is promoting the project, as saying. To be preserved, the seeds must be

kept below freezing point. Operators plan to replace the air inside the vault

once a year at winter-time, but even if for some reason this becomes impossible,

the permafrost will still keep the seeds viable. The thick walls, airlocks and

doors mean that even if global warming accelerates badly, it would take many

decades for hotter air to reach the seeds. " This will be the world's most

secure gene bank by some orders of magnitude, " said Fowler. " But its seeds will

only be used when all other samples have gone for some reason. It is a fail-safe

depository, rather than a conventional seed bank. " The proposal is backed by

Norway, which sketched a similar project back in the 1980s that was thwarted at

the time by the Soviet Union's access to

Spitsbergen. The seed bank is expected to be created next year, New Scientist

says. Source: Agence France-Presse

" When the power of love becomes stronger than the love of power, we will have

peace. "

Jimi Hendrix

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