Title : Norway is upgrading its 'doomsday' Arctic seed vault
link : Norway is upgrading its 'doomsday' Arctic seed vault
Norway is upgrading its 'doomsday' Arctic seed vault
Norway will spend close to $13 million to upgrade its doomsday seed vault that's designed to protect crops against the cataclysms of nuclear war or disease.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was constructed in 2008 to protect the world's food supplies.
If a nuclear disaster or global warming kills certain crops, governments can request certain crops from the vault to rebuild their supplies.
The revamp would cover the construction of a new, concrete-built access tunnel, Norway's Agriculture Ministry said in a statement.
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Pictured, the entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It was constructed in 2008 as a place that could house the world's food supplies in case of nuclear war or global warming
It would also go toward creating a service building to house emergency power and refrigerating units, as well as other electrical equipment that emits heat through the tunnel, they added.
Jon Georg Dale, Norway's minister of agriculture and food, said that construction would begin soon.
'It is a great and important task to safeguard all the genetic material that is crucial to global food security,' Dale explained.
The vault is meant as a natural deep freeze to back up the world's gene banks in case of disasters.
It holds more than 5,000 species of cop plants, such as beans, potatoes and grains, though it's equipped to hold more than that.
The vault is capable of holding 2.25 million seeds from over 4.5 million crop varieties, according to Mashable.
The vault is aimed at providing humans with a 'Noah's Ark' of food in the event of a global disaster. Pictured, people walk into the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is now ten years old
A $13 million investment from Norway's Agriculture Ministry will help fund the construction of a new, concrete-built access tunnel, as well as the creation of a new service building
As of Monday, just over 76,000 new seed samples were added to the vault, which means that it now holds more than 1 million seed samples from gene banks worldwide.
Crops including the Estonian onion potato and barley are among those added to the vault.
The vault also holds some of the world's most precious books in digital form.
Storing them in digital form allows them to survive the most extreme conditions, including nuclear war.
The data is stored as film, rather than on hard drives or other storage techniques.
The film is stored deep inside a mine called Mine 3 that is frozen in permafrost, ensuring that it keeps a constant temperature.
The vault is located on the island of Spitsbergen, in Norway's Svalbard archipelago.
An unexpected thaw of permafrost meant some water flowed into the entrance of the tunnel to the vault in late 2016. A decade ago, Norway said that it had cost $9 million to build the facility.
In 2015, researchers made a first withdrawal from the vault after Syria's civil war damaged a seed bank near the Syrian city of Aleppo. The seeds were grown and re-deposited at the Svalbard vault last year.
'This demonstrates that the seed vault is a worldwide insurance for food supply for future generations,' Dale said in a statement.
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