Recent visitors include several US senators and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. “Visitors see it as a James Bond kind of place, as extraordinary,” Mr Koch said. Perched on the side of a mountain, a door leads the rare visitor down a 120-meter-long tunnel into the mountain. Located on the outskirts of Longyearbyen, the main town in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, the grey concrete entrance to the vault blends into the wilderness. “We wanted to make sure that the publicity around this deposit is not taken by someone for different purposes,” Mr Koch said. The shipments were conducted secretly to avoid any security problems. Global Crop Diversity Trust (which funded the shipments) spokesman Michael Koch said the operation proved “that the global system of fail-safe backup works”. The doomsday seed vault on Norways remote Svalbard archipelago houses the worlds back up supply of seeds to ensure crop diversity. “We can get, through crossing and breeding, traits that are tolerant to drought, tolerant to heat, tolerant to specific diseases and so forth.”
ICARDA Director-General Mahmoud El-Solh said: They will be used by ICARDA to fulfil requests for crop diversity from breeders, researchers and farmers around the world, so they can develop and test new strains to cope with a changing climate and new diseases. Nearly two-thirds of the specimens withdrawn last month were unique varieties of ancient crops from across the Middle East and Africa. In recent years, the scientists started recovering their critical inventory of seeds, sourced from around the Middle East and beyond, and safekeeping them beneath the Arctic ice, just 1,300 kilometres from the North Pole. ICARDA was used to develop new strains of drought and heat resistant wheat.
#DOOMSDAY VAULT SYRIA FULL#
The move comes after scientists ceased full operations at leading gene bank, the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Aleppo, Syria, as a result of the bloody conflict in the war-torn country. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a seed bank nestled in the Arctic Archipelago, was created to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters, as a backup for humanity.īut officials this week confirmed scientists have withdrawn from the Norwegian government operated bank - known as the ‘doomsday vault’ - for the first time since it started in February, 2008. Under the control of the Norwegian government, the vault contains hundreds of thousands of seeds from different crops from around the world, and is supposedly indestructible, the Guardianreports.Ī recent report, co-authored by the Crop Trust, revealed that over the last 50 years, the world's food stock has become increasingly centered on only a few crop types.A ‘DOOMSDAY vault’ buried deep in the Arctic to preserve seeds of almost every crop on Earth in the event of a catastrophe has been opened earlier than expected. Nicknamed the 'doomsday vault,' the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is 130 metres up a mountainside so to be out of the reach of rising sea levels, on the remote archipelago island of Svalbard, Norway, which is located just 800 miles from the North Pole.
Although the Aleppo cold store is still available, the surrounding land is unusable for planting. However, once the conflict in Syria became too fierce, ICARDA operations were moved to other areas in the region. The seeds, which were delivered on Monday, originated from ICARDA's genebank in Aleppo, Syria, before being gifted to the Svalbard vault. The seeds will be duplicated and replanted in order to re-establish ICARDA's active collection and the Trust have emphasised that " could hold the key to developing new crop varieties crucial to meeting world food demands with climate change." The duplicated seeds will then be returned to the vault.ĭr Mahmoud Solh, the director of ICARDA said, "We are delighted to be able to retrieve these seeds, so that ICARDA can continue to play a vital role providing highly valuable genetic resources to our partners.It is immensely encouraging to see first-hand that the measures we have all collaborated on to back-up our seed collections work so effectively when finally called upon." Scientists have had to tap the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway because of the chaos in Syria. The deliveries sent to Lebanon includes forages, faba beans, lathyrus, and the wild relatives of cereals and pulses, while those sent to Morocco contain cultivated wheat, barley, lentil and chickpea. See the ‘Doomsday’ Seed Vault Opened in Response to Syria Crisis. An underground seed repository intended for international emergencies has been opened at the request of a global agricultural research organization whose work at its original base in Aleppo was halted due to the war in Syria.Īccording to a statement from the Global Crop Diversity Trust, who ensure worldwide crop conservation and who funded the shipments, a delivery of 128 boxes of 38,073 different seed samples was secretly sent Morocco and Lebanon, following a request from the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA).
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