Some 268,000 seed samples that represent the agriculture of 220 countries have already been catalogued, coded and moved into the Vault. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault established in the permafrost in the mountains of Svalbard opened on Februon a remote island in the Arctic Circle, receiving inaugural shipments of 100 million seeds that originated in over 100 countries. In all, the shipments of seeds secured in the vault today weighed an approximately astonishing 10 tons, filling 676 boxes. Each sample may contain hundreds of seeds or more. Those logistics are still being worked out, he said.Īfter all, one can expect a few unknowns when trying to prevent a doomsday scenario.Built near the village of Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen, the vault at its inception contains 268,000 distinct samples of seeds - each one originating from a different farm or field in the world. Lainoff couldn’t say how many of the 116,484 varieties that are currently inside Svalbard’s vault at minus 18 Celsius will be withdrawn and moved to ICARDA’s facilities in Lebanon and Morocco, or when – or how – that would occur. They will replace what they had on ice in Norway with some of the newly generated seeds. With new seeds, they can resume the important research they’ve been doing for decades. ICARDA scientists need the seeds from Norway so they can plant and regenerate them at ICARDA facilities in Lebanon and Morocco. Three years later, with no sign of conditions in Syria improving, it had become time to cash in – or perhaps more appropriately, to defrost – its insurance policy. ICARDA’s gene bank in Aleppo, Syria, includes more than 135,000 varieties of wheat, fava bean, lentil and chickpea crops, as well as the world’s most valuable barley collection, according to Lainoff.īy 2012, Lainoff said, “it had become increasingly difficult to operate” in Aleppo, so ICARDA’s international staff – which had over the years successfully developed new strains of drought- and heat-resistant wheat – fled the country, leaving the center and its critical inventory behind. “Any day that facility could be hit,” he said. “We just don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Lainoff about the Syria-based International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, one of the Crop Trust’s 11 global seed banks. No seeds have ever been withdrawn, according to Lainoff, but Syria’s civil war has brought such chaos that it has the guardians of the so-called “Doomsday Vault” sounding the doomsday alarm. The vault is meant to be opened only in the event of a catastrophic event, like flooding or drought, that would threaten a crop with extinction, according to Brian Lainoff, a spokesman for the Crop Trust, one of the vault’s international stewards. The Global Seed Vault, something of an agricultural Noah’s Ark, keeps a seed of just about every known crop in the world inside a frozen vault on the Norwegian island of Svalbard. The horror of Syria’s civil war is familiar to most, thanks to the ghastly images of death and destruction – and most recently, of fleeing refugees – that have played out across our screens.īut the conflict’s ugly effects have now reached far beyond the devastated streets of Syria and the crowded camps where its refugees huddle, and into the unlikeliest of places: deep below the frozen tundra of an Arctic island.
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