Doomsday Vault. Where is the unique building and are tourists allowed there?

On an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, far from the eyes of most travelers, a unique Universal Seed Storage, or as it is also called – the Doomsday Storage, is “hiding”.

< h2>Basic information about the Global Seed Vault

The Global Seed Vault or Global Seed Vault (in English — Svalbard Global Seed Vault) is a unique structure designed to preserve the gene pool of modern grain crops.

It, like a “black box”, serves humanitarian purposes and is part of the international system for the conservation of genetic diversity of plants, which is managed by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

There they offer safe, free and long-term storage duplicate seeds from all genebanks and countries participating in the joint efforts of the world community to ensure the future food supply of the world.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault could play a role in the event of a global disaster, so much so that some call it the “Doomsday Vault”.

However, its value is thought to be far more in providing backups for individual seed collections – in the event , if the original samples (and their duplicates in conventional genebanks) are lost due to:

• natural disasters
• human conflicts
• change in politics
• mismanagement or any other circumstances

What exactly is “hidden” in the Doomsday Repository

The World Repository stores seeds that are considered valuable from the point of view of food and agriculture, and are also important for research, plant breeding, and education (according to international law) .

Specimens of more than 5,000 plant species preserved there are seed samples with unique genotypes. They include:

• agricultural crop varieties
• crop varieties from farmers' land
• breeding material
• wild plants (which are related to new varieties of crops and can be gene donors for them)

According to information from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the largest “collection” of samples in the vault are varieties of rice, wheat and barley:

• over 150,000 samples of wheat and rice
• about 80,000 samples of barley

Others, widely represented in the Vault of the Judgment culture days:

• sorghum (over 50,000 specimens)
• Phaseolus bean species (over 40,000 specimens)
• corn (more than 35,000 specimens)
• wheat from the legume family (more than 30,000 specimens)
• soy (more than 25,000 specimens)
• kikuyu grass (more than 20 000 copies)
• chickpeas, or Turkish peas (over 20,000 copies)
• potatoes, peanuts, Cajanus beans or pigeon peas, oats, rye, alfalfa, Tritikosecale and Brassica grain hydrides ( from 10,000 to 20,000 seed samples)

Where is the repository located and are tourists allowed there

It is believed that the idea of ​​creating a World Seed Vault belongs to conservationist Cary Fowler. The corresponding initiative began to be discussed in the 1980s.

In 1984, the Nordic Gene Bank (now NordGen) created a seed reserve in an abandoned coal mine near the Norwegian city of Longyearbyen (in a steel container inside coal mine #3 ), but the idea of ​​creating a more global repository continued to develop.

Scientists noted that permafrost (with a temperature of about -3.5°C) is not optimal for storing global genetic heritage. In addition, the storage of the Scandinavian seed collection in a coal mine, where high levels of hydrocarbon gases were periodically recorded, was not sufficiently safe.

In view of this, the decision was approved to create a new structure “in virgin rocks” – with additional cooling (to reduce the temperature to the required level, standard for gene banks) and without coal.

In October 2004, the Norwegian government committed to finance and establish a World Seed Depository in the mountains of the island of Svalbard (also known as Svalbard). It is about the Norwegian archipelago, located in the Arctic Ocean at a distance of 1300 km from the North Pole.

In June 2006, the prime ministers of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland solemnly laid the first stone of the “future repository “, and on February 26, 2008, the official opening of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, carved out of “pristine solid rock”, took place.

The seed storage area is located more than 100 meters deep in the mountain and under rock layers 40 to 60 meters thick. It has an additional cooling system, which allows to reduce the stable temperature there of minus 3-4°C to the necessary minus 18°C.

The seed warehouse consists of three halls (about 9.5 by 27 meters in size), each of which can accommodate about 1.5 million seed samples. That is, the total storage capacity is 4.5 million copies.

>Currently, the funds of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault amount to more than 1,200,000 seed samples (only one of the three halls is used, cooled to minus 18°C ​​and equipped with shelves for seed boxes). As of the beginning of 2018, there were also 4,231 samples of Ukrainian crops stored there (in particular, Myronov breeding wheat varieties bred by our scientists).

For better storage, the seeds are packed in airtight bags made of three layers of foil, and then placed in plastic containers on metal racks. The low temperature and limited access to oxygen ensure low metabolic activity and slow down the aging of the seeds.

The entrance portal is a simple concrete structure that over time acquired the status of a “world icon” (in part thanks to the illuminated fiber optic art installation “Eternal repercussion” by the Norwegian artist Dyveke Sanne).

Spitsbergen visitors often approach the Doomsday Vault to take selfies or group photos and “tick” that they were there. At the same time, travelers and tourists are simply not allowed inside the vault.

Instead, anyone who wants to can walk through the vault online — thanks to a special virtual tour.