High above the Arctic Circle on a Norwegian island is a special place in which seeds are kept as a safeguard of world wide loss of crops and climate change. In the Svalbard archipelago there is a huge vault carved into the side of a mountain where seeds from plants from all over the world are kept. Why? Well to safeguard food supplies in the case of a disaster, natural or man-made.
The vault can store 4.5 millions varieties of crops, thereby safeguarding our planet’s plants, and our own future, in this frozen wasteland. Think of it as a huge walk-in freezer but with humanity in mind. This sounds like something o
ut of a James Bond movie as we can imagine the value of this place, ever as we might be impressed by the oddity it represents. What seeds would you put in there?
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- A conservationist holds two vials of peas at the Svalbard Global Seed Bank.
