Doomsday vault 60 upgrade#
Doomsday vault 60 plus#

Safeguarding a diversity of crops is considered vital to humanity being able to feed itself as climate change takes hold. “As we see the climate heating up and places looking for varieties to use in more challenging conditions, these seed banks are being more actively used.” Maintaining plant diversity is “incredibly important” for developing new, more productive crop varieties, he says.īut Dempewolf says seed banks are increasingly being called on to help farmers adapt to a warming world, too. It is best practice to have a double backup of global seed banks, he says, both at the Svalbard vault and in other seed banks. Hannes Dempewolf at the Crop Trust, one of the partners that runs the vault with the Norwegian government, says that although today’s deposit takes the samples past the milestone of one million, Svalbard is “not just a numbers game” but is instead about prioritising unique species. “Now we have planned for worst case scenarios in a better way,” she says at #seedvault2020 /QBNaq4xSpt

Doomsday vault 60 upgrade#

Norwegian PM Solberg tells me⁩ the €20m waterproofing upgrade to Svalbard seed vault so soon after it was built is a sign climate change is happening more rapidly than we thought. The vault will still have plenty of space after the new arrivals, as it has capacity for around 4.5 million samples.

Seed banks in Morocco and South Korea are also made their first deliveries. Others like the Julius Kühn Institute in Germany brought their first seeds, including the European crab apple ( Malus sylvestris), a wild relative of domesticated apples. Read more: Extreme weather could trigger frequent global food shocks The Indian seed bank ICRISAT is brought more than 2800 accessions, adding to the more than 110,000 it has already deposited. “It’s more urgent than ever that we act now to protect this diversity before it really is too late,” the prince said in a statement. These include wild carrot ( Daucus carota) and some forage species such as perennial ryegrass ( Lolium perenne), red fescue ( Festuca rubra) and clover ( Trifolium sp.), as well as five species of orchid. The UK’s Kew Gardens brought 27 wild plant species from Prince Charles’s residence in the west of England. Corn that is sacred to the Cherokee people, bean varieties and a squash that can stay fresh for a year without refrigeration are among their crops being backed up.

In the next hour the seed bank is due to get its biggest deposit since it first opened twelve years ago #SeedVault2020 /EPiXOBDqU1Īmong the seeds that made the three-hour flight north from Oslo are those from the Cherokee Nation, the first US indigenous tribe to deposit seeds at the vault. The Svalbard facility is effectively a backup of the backups.Īmazing views here of the Svalbard global seed vault. Seed collectors from 36 banks around the world – eight for the first time – brought seeds for accessions, the term used for new samples entering the bank. “Now we have planned for worst case scenarios in a better way,” she says. Solberg told New Scientist that the fact the facility had required upgrading so soon after its opening was a symbol that climate change is coming more rapidly than expected.

Doomsday vault 60 plus#

The latest deposit marks the first time the vault has opened its doors to new seeds since a €20 million upgrade that includes a new waterproofed access tunnel, plus measures to prepare it for a world on track to be several degrees hotter by the century’s end. Read more: The race to find wild relatives of food plants before it’s too late While the vault itself was untouched, that year the Arctic experienced record heat that scientists say was almost certainly due to human-made climate change. Yet in October 2016, the entrance tunnel to the facility was flooded due to a combination of heavy rainfall and permafrost melting. The permafrost on Spitsbergen, the island in the Svalbard archipelago where the bank is located, means the seeds should stay frozen even if the cooling system that keeps the vault at -18☌ is hit by a power failure. However, the resilience of the vault itself has recently come under the spotlight. The first withdrawal from the bank took place in 2015, to help conservationists who lost access to a major seed bank in Aleppo in the Syrian civil war. The vault is designed as the ultimate insurance policy for restoring crop diversity to smaller seed banks around the world after extreme weather, conflict, fire and other events. The first seeds in today’s major deposit have gone into the Svalbard seed vault.