The Seed Vault

This is a special place. Let’s go deeper inside. We have prepared this seed vault for about 4.5 million seed samples.

Welcome to the Global Seed Vault. This is a facility where we store copies of seeds from gene banks all over the world. Now we are entering a long tunnel which leads into the Global Seed Vault.

Deep inside the Permafrost Mountain, close to the North Pole, is a storage facility with the capacity to store over 4 million different crops and a maximum of 2.5 billion seeds. The Global Seed Vault was created as a backup system for the world’s gene banks to protect humanity against any catastrophes that could potentially wipe out our agricultural diversity.

We are now quite deep in the mountain. When we pass this door, we are in the Permafrost part of the rocks here. Now we are moving from approximately 0 degrees into the Permafrost section. We have the Permafrost here, minus 5. In there it’s minus 18. And here you can feel the atmosphere. It’s silent. You can hear the echo. It’s a very nice place to grasp the atmosphere of being in an important place.

Some journalists call this the Noah’s Ark of Plant Diversity. And personally I think that’s quite a good name. We call it the world’s most important room. So let’s go in.

If humanity can survive, we will need new plant varieties. And the material you need for developing new varieties are genetic diversity. We have seeds from all countries in the world. Kenya, Mexico, India, Peru, Germany, Colombia, Costa Rica, Zambia, Brazil, Australia. Here we have some nice wooden boxes from Tajikistan.

Workers in gene banks, farmers have struggled to produce all these seeds and sent them here because they feel safe when they send the seeds here. Svalbard is a safe place. The Permafrost here, so it’s frozen even if the artificial cooling fails. And Svalbard is quite far away from conflicts.

Here we have boxes from Russia and here we have boxes from Ukraine. And even if there are enemies abroad outside, in this seed vault they cooperate. And here is some wooden boxes made in North Korea. So even North Korea have sent seeds here. And in the seed vault here, international conflicts are cooled down.

You see this empty space in this shelf. We had seed boxes from Icardas Genbank in Aleppo. They sent seeds here from 2008. And when the Genbank in Aleppo was ruined, we were able to send the seeds back so they can start creating a new Genbank. This system saved the seeds. If they had no backup here, the seeds would have gone extinct.

This is the world’s largest collection of genetic diversity of crops. What you see in here is 13,000 years of agricultural history. The genes you find in here existed in the natural flora in the Middle East 10, 15,000 years ago. And then farmers started to use these plants and they improved the plants into the crops that we have today.

There is in the seed vault about 70,000 different varieties of barley. And 150,000 samples of rice and 140,000 samples of wheat. Researchers investigate what are the properties we find in these old varieties. And they use genes for making new varieties for new purposes, for new growing conditions.

Without this material, plant breeders, agriculture will never manage to feed the growing population. This is the raw material that we need for the future, that breeders need to make new varieties to increase the world’s food production.

The work Genbanks do every day, conserving their seeds, preparing the genes for future food supplies, is a very, very crucial and important work. I have quite a good feeling when I’m in here and know that this is her…