A vault carved into the Arctic permafrost and filled with samples of the world's most important seeds was inaugurated today, providing a 'Noah's Ark' of food crops in the event of a global catastrophe.
Aimed at safeguarding biodiversity in the face of climate change, wars and other natural and man-made disasters, the new seed bank has the capacity to hold up to 4.5m batches, or twice the number of crop varieties believed to exist in the world today.
In sub-freezing temperatures, Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg inaugurated the vault by symbolically depositing a box containing grains of rice in one of its three spacious cold chambers.
Norway has assumed the entire €6m charge for building the so-called 'doomsday vault' in its Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, around 1,000km from the North Pole.
Overlooking a fjord, the vault forms a long trident-shaped tunnel bored deep into the sandstone and limestone.
Metal shelves lining each of the three cold chambers will be stacked with airtight bags filled with seed samples, though just one of the chambers will be needed in the initial period.
Some 268,000 samples, which are duplicates of seed samples from 21 seed banks around the world, are already stored in the new vault at a constant temperature of -18C.
Even if the freezer system fails, the permafrost will ensure that temperatures never rise above -3.5C.
Contributions from the more than 1,300 other seed banks worldwide are expected at a later date.
Protected by high walls of fortified concrete, an armoured door, a sensor alarm and the native polar bears that roam the region, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has been built 130m above current sea level.
That puts it high enough to escape flooding if the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets were to melt entirely, due to global warming.
The concrete cocoon has also been built to withstand nuclear missile attacks.
