Norway puts seeds on ice in "doomsday" vault

Published 10:29 pm Tuesday, February 26, 2008

LONGYEARBYEN, Norway — Norway opened a frozen “doomsday” vault Tuesday deep within an Arctic mountain where millions of seeds will be stored to safeguard against wars or natural disasters wiping out food crops around the globe.

Biblical references repeatedly cropped up as guests at the opening ceremony carried the first seed deposits into the vault in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

“This is a frozen Garden of Eden,” European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said, standing in one of the frosty vaults against a backdrop of large discs made of ice.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg called the vault an “insurance policy” and added his own biblical comparison: “It is the Noah’s Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations.”

Svalbard Global Seed Vault, just 620 miles from the North Pole, is designed to house as many as 4.5 million crop seeds from all over the world. It is built to withstand global warming, earthquakes and even nuclear strikes.

The first deposit in the vault was a box of rice seeds from 104 countries.

The vault, built by the Norwegian government for $9.1 million, will operate like a bank box. Norway owns the bank, but the countries depositing seeds own them and can use them as needed free of charge.

The vault will serve as a backup to the other 1,400 seed banks around the world, in case their deposits are lost. War wiped out seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and another bank in the Philippines was flooded in the wake of a typhoon in 2006.

The seeds are packed in silvery foil containers — as many as 500 in each sample — and placed on blue and orange metal shelves inside three 32-by-88-foot storage chambers. Each vault can hold 1.5 million sample packages of all types of crop seeds, from carrots to wheat.

The group was founded by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and Biodiversity International, a Rome-based research group.