Planning for Doomsday: Agricultural Backup for the Human Race

What would happen if you gave Saudi-style oil money to a northern European country? Instead of palaces to their own vanity and fundamentalist Islamic schools across the globe, what would they spend their money on?

‘Doomsday’ Seed Vault Opens in Arctic

A “doomsday” seed vault built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters opened Tuesday deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. “The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is our insurance policy,” Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates at the opening ceremony. “It is the Noah’s Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations.”

The vault will serve as a backup for hundreds of other seed banks worldwide. It has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the world and shield them from man-made and natural disasters. Dug into the permafrost of the mountain, it has been built to withstand an earthquake or a nuclear strike.

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, it’s the oil-rich state of non-EU Norway that financed, built, and will manage the facility. It paid $9.1 million for construction and will pay for maintenance costs, facility personnel, and storing the seeds at a constant temperature of minus 18 degrees Celsius (even if the freezer system fails, temperatures inside will never rise above -3.5 Celsius). That’s not all that much cash—but then there is the fact that any nation can deposit and withdraw seeds free of charge. Pakistan and Kenya, both undergoing serious civil unrest, have sent seed collections. (Samples sent from Colombia are being closely scrutinized to avoid the project becoming a vehicle for drug trafficking.)

This is as close to post-disaster backup for the human race that we can envision today. See the specs at Wikipedia. An image of its internal structure appears below.