Friday, February 09, 2007
The doomsday vault
The top-security repository, carved into the permafrost of a mountain in the remote Svalbard archipelago near the North Pole, will preserve some three million batches of seeds from all known varieties of the planet's crops.As someone with mildly survivalist tendencies, I think this is a pretty good idea. Seed diversity is not a mainstream concern, but as the worlds people leave the farm and as corporations begin to dominate the seed business, regional heirloom varieties of many types of plants are lost. In addition, hybrid seeds produced by seed companies do not reproduce "true." There are several important organizations dedicated to preserving endangered non-hybrid, open pollinated varietals, and this is a very good thing for many reasons. Native Seeds/SEARCH and Seed Savers Exchange are two non-profit organizations that are devoted to this practice (and also have retail operations for you gardeners out there).
The hope is that the vault will make it possible to re-establish crops obliterated by major disasters.
The seed samples, such as wheat and potatoes, will be stored in two chambers located deep inside a mountain, accessed by a 120-meter (395-foot) tunnel. The tunnel and vaults will be excavated by boring and blasting techniques and the rock walls sprayed with concrete.
The seeds will be maintained at a temperature of minus 18 degrees Celsius (minus 0.4 Fahrenheit).
Behind the airlock door, each chamber will measure 375 square meters (4,036 square feet). Corrugated plastic boxes the size of moving boxes will sit on rows of metal shelves.
Each box will contain about 400 samples in envelopes made of polyethelene, and each sample will contain around 500 seeds.
The samples will be stored in watertight foil packages to act as a barrier against moisture should a power failure disable refrigeration systems.
Back to Svalbard. When I read the article my first question was how long seeds could remain viable under these conditions. According to the crop trust website FAQ, seeds stored in this manner should remain viable for a minimum of 20-30 years. I wonder what the germination rate might be after that kind of duration, the longest viability estimate I've seen predicted for stored seeds.
My second question, which remains unanswered, was exactly what is to be stored, how the decisions are being made, and whether or not the final inventory will be made public. For the good of mankind, I hope our friends at crop trust do not ignore important plants that are purely, uh, medicinal in nature.
12 Comments:
By 
GreenmanTim, at
Fri Feb 09, 11:21:00 AM:
This is actually a very good idea. A few years ago, there was a terrible blight that pretty much decimated commercially grown varieties of corn. Think about the biological terrorism implications of that for a moment. No silage for all those beeves. No high fructose corn syrup for all those products that require it for sweetening. No 12 million acres of ethanol producing fields to offset our petroleum imports. It took paleobotanists going back to the hinterlands of Mexico to find resistant strains of ancient maize to reestablish our commercial corn varieties. Those "heritage grains" should be among those preserved against future disasters.
By 
, at
Fri Feb 09, 01:53:00 PM:
CV, you have totally redeemed yourself in my eyes for all those long posts of yours I skip over.
By Catchy Pseudonym, at
Fri Feb 09, 02:14:00 PM:
Excellent idea. Here's hoping they've reserved some Super Skunk or Northern Lights seeds. Food's a good idea, but I think anyone cracking that thing open in 3150 after the aliens have destroyed the world might really be in the mood to grow their own stash.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Fri Feb 09, 02:55:00 PM:
Would you call these the seeds of our destruction?
By joated, at
Fri Feb 09, 08:35:00 PM:
Viability should mean nothing in 20-30 years. The DNA content alone in those seeds could be used to breed new plants ala Jurassic Park.
That is, if they haven't outlawed cloning or other means of DNA replication.
By SR, at
Fri Feb 09, 11:16:00 PM:
20-30 years seems like a blip in time. At least the permafrost won't have melted by then from the global warming due in 200-500 years.
By , at
Fri Feb 09, 11:55:00 PM:
Just like in the BIBLE when the pharos dream was explained by ABRAHAM and the set aside some food for when they had seven years of drougth and fammine
By OregonJon, at
Sat Feb 10, 02:22:00 AM:
Good idea, poorly executed. Seed survival is better when seeds are disbursed into many sites, not concentrated in one super secure site. The many needn't be as secure as the one now planned. All the eggs in one basket and all that.
By Cappy, at
Sat Feb 10, 10:18:00 AM:
Isn't this dangerously close to the Fortress of Solitude?
By , at
Sat Feb 10, 11:56:00 AM:
Maybe cold storage is not the only way to go. I've read that seed grains found in Egyptian tombs, thousands of years old, have been germinated. Maintaining biodiversity is vital, inasmuch as food grains are subject to disease. It would be a bad thing if some new virus were to pop up, say, that would destroy all or nearly all of some vital crop and make planting more of the same crop unviable.
By , at
Sat Feb 10, 12:50:00 PM:
If the Earth was to suffer a disaster significant enough to wipe out our crops to the extent that the surviving humans would need to use the seeds stored in this vault, how would they get there? The island of Svalbard is a long way from anywhere. On the Trust's website they state, "Svalbard is a group of islands nearly a thousand kilometres north of mainland Norway. Remote by any standards, Svalbard’s airport is in fact the northernmost point in the world to be serviced by scheduled flights – usually one a day. For nearly four months a year the islands are enveloped in total darkness."
Try using google maps to see where it is Longyearbyen, Svalbard. In a disaster so large that humanity's food source is lost we may not have the kind of ships necessary to travel that far north to retrieve the seeds.
Also, the seeds effectiveness should not rely on cloning or other DNA manipulation techniques. Do you want to rely on there being electricity, computers, and all of the other machines necessary to extract, manipulate, grow, and then produce on an industrial scale, the DNA and seeds necessary to rapidly replace the crops that would be necessary after a disaster of that magnitude?
I would much rather see several of these vaults spread across the world with the seeds regularly updated, or perhaps additional vaults added on with fresh seeds while the previous seeds were left in sealed cold storage as a long odds insurance should new seeds added just before a disaster be damaged in some way.
By Georg Felis, at
Sun Feb 11, 02:12:00 AM:
The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service also operates a number of Plant Materials Centers across the United States with much less publicity. These are normally small centers that maintain a large number of plant cultivars and store them in stable cold seed storage. They support research and ship these seeds all over the world so if for example a university researcher would happen to need some East Hembleck Foxtail, there’s probably a PMC somewhere that can ship them a couple hundred seeds. They’re neat places, there is quite a bit of logistics in growing a garden sized plot of several hundred varieties of plants and making sure each plot is harvested, cleaned, and stored correctly.
http://plant-materials.nrcs.usda.gov/
