Disaster Planning: Norway Builds a 'Doomsday Vault'

Published on Thursday, January 12, 2006 by the Independent / UK
Disaster Planning: Norway Builds a 'Doomsday Vault'
by Steve Connor

Norway has revealed a plan to build a "doomsday vault" hewn out of an
Arctic mountain to store two million crop seeds in the event of a
global disaster.
The store is designed to hold all the seeds representing the world's
crops and is being built to safeguard future food supplies in the
event of widespread environmental collapse.

"If the worst came to the worst, this would allow the world to
reconstruct agriculture on this planet," Cary Fowler, the director of
the Global Crop Diversity Trust, told New Scientist magazine. The
Norwegian government is planning to start work on the seed vault next
year when construction engineers will drill into a sandstone mountain
on the island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard archipelago, about
600 miles from the North Pole.

Permafrost will keep the vault below freezing point and the seeds
will be further protected by metre-thick walls of reinforced
concrete, two airlocks and high-security, blast-proof doors. To
survive, the seeds need to be frozen. The plan is to replace the air
inside the vault each winter, when temperatures on Spitsbergen fall
to minus 18C.

"This will be the world's most secure gene bank by some orders of
magnitude," said Dr Fowler. "But its seeds will only be used when all
other samples have gone for some reason. It is a fail-safe
depository, rather than a conventional seed bank." The £1.67m
facility will not be permanently manned but "the mountains are
patrolled by polar bears".

The proposal is backed by Norway, which outlined a similar project in
the 1980s that was thwarted at the time by the Soviet Union's access
to Spitsbergen.

Wera Helstroem, a spokeswoman for Norway's foreign ministry
said: "Norway is seen as a good place, because it has a stable
society and democracy."

The number of seeds and types of plants would be determined by the
countries wishing to use the seed bank, which would be operated as if
it were a bank vault, she added. "It is like a bank box. We own the
vault, but other countries own what is in it. They can put things in
and take them out whenever they want to."

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited