The Svalbard Global Seed Vault recently received a huge deposit of more than 14,000 seed samples from around the world. The samples were collected as part of decade-long effort to safeguard vital crops that are threatened by everything from war to environmental pressures, both of which are rising across the globe.
Known as the “doomsday vault,” the facility derives its name from its location on the Norwegian island of Svalbard, some 807 miles above the Arctic Circle. The vault itself is a series of man-made caves located deep inside a mountain. Permafrost and thick rock ensure that the seed samples will remain frozen even without power. The facility accepts new seed samples only three times a year.
The Svalbard Seed Vault is one of more than 1,700 genebanks worldwide that hold collections of food crops for safekeeping. The Svalbard vault is unique in that it only stores duplicates (backups) of seed samples that are held in other global genebanks. This serves as an added backup in case of some sort of failure.
Many global genebanks are vulnerable and/or exposed to natural catastrophes and war. Some also suffer from a lack of funding or poor management that endangers their seed collections. A temperature of −18°C is required for optimal storage of the seeds, so power outages or malfunctioning freezers can ruin an entire collection. Svalbard’s duplicate samples safeguard against such catastrophic losses.
It will take many more years for the Seed Vault to fully duplicate the world’s unique crop genetic material. The Vault has the capacity to store 4.5 million varieties of crops. Each packet of seeds consists of an average of 500 seeds, so it has a maximum capacity of 2.5 billion seeds. It currently stores more than 1.3 million seed samples originating from almost every country in the world. They even maintain a public database of stored seed samples that can be searched.
The latest deposits come from 21 different gene banks and include sorghum and pearl millet shipped from Sudan’s crop gene bank, which has been nearly destroyed during the country’s civil war. Malawi, facing a barrage of extreme weather events, provided “velvet beans,” a nitrogen-fixing legume. Staple varieties of rice, beans, and corn from Brazil, and sorghum, eggplant, and lima beans from the Philippines were also deposited.
Notably, the genebank in the Philippines has faced severe losses to its seed stocks due to extreme events. In 2006, Typhoon Xangsane flooded the laboratory’s main research building in Los Baños, almost wiping out the collection. The damage and subsequent loss of power caused the “irreversible” loss of several traditional varieties of crops, with some 70% of the collection ruined. Then, in 2012, a fire ravaged the genebank building, destroying 60% of the in vitro crop collections, many of which had no backups anywhere else in the world.
Beyond safeguarding the world’s crucial food crops, the Seed Vault also represents an impressive international collaboration spanning decades. This latest deposit marks the 66th contribution to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which has received seed samples from 123 genebanks across 85 countries since its opening in February 2008. (Sources: SeedWorld, Grist, Reuters)
