![]() The whole scene looks like the title sequence of the next Philip K. Standing guard is a blinking red security system you could easily imagine scanning your fingerprints, eyes, and thoughts.ĭown this tunnel, scientists buried in thick coats and hardhats wheel trollies packed with mysterious black boxes bound for the belly of the Vault. Step through its grim gray doors and you find yourself in a cylindrical steel tunnel drilled 100 meters into the solid rock, straight through the permafrost. If that name isn’t the stuff of science fiction, consider the place: The entrance, a tilted monolith of concrete and steel, jabs out of the side of an ice-clutched Arctic mountain like some kind of wintry cubist bunker. Among its staff, however, it’s called simply the “Vault”. One of these precautions is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, known to some as the Doomsday Vault. What we hear less about, however, are the real-life precautions governments and research groups take in case any of these scenarios bear fruit – or rather, threaten to wipe it all out.īy Miksu (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons Enter the Svalbard Global Seed Vault These often come in the form of annihilating wars, pulverizing natural catastrophes, or sweeping pandemics that leave bands of ragged survivors scrambling for boxed potatoes and bullets amid hordes of cannibalistic zombies. Literature, cinema, even video games give us no small supply of global disaster scenarios. When this hall reaches capacity, the second storage hall will be prepared and cooled to the level needed for seed conservation.Hope for the future, plan for the fallout Only one of the three halls is in use, cooled to minus 18☌ and equipped with shelves for seed boxes. To date, the holdings in the Seed Vault are close to 900,000 seed samples. ![]() Each hall can accommodate about 1.5 million seed samples, thus giving the Seed Vault a total capacity to store 4.5 million seed accessions. The seed store facility consists of three halls, each with a base measuring about 9.5 x 27 meters. In addition, the Seed Vault is equipped with generators that provide electricity in the case of a power outage. ![]() Electricity for the Seed Vault is provided by the public power plant in Longyearbyen. The seed storage area has an additional cooling system, to bring the seed storing temperature to minus 18☌ and ensure that it remains constant. The mountain mass has permafrost, with a stable temperature of between minus 3 and 4☌. ![]() ![]() The seed storage area itself is located more than 100 meters inside the mountain, and under layers of rock that range between 40 and 60 meters thick. The Seed Vault, carved into virgin solid rock was opened on 26 February 2008. Many Svalbard visitors go the Vault’s entrance to take selfies and tick off “been there”. The entrance portal is a simple concrete construction that has gained status as a global icon, in part due to “Perpetual Repercussion”, an illuminated fiber optic art installation created by the Norwegian artist, Dyveke Sanne, that decorates the entrance. ![]()
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