The seeds stored at Svalbard are the freshest, and they’re already all in one place. “It’s like a safety deposit box in the bank,” explains Thomas Payne, head of the wheat collection at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center outside of Mexico City.Īmri told me back in April that between the center’s standard safety backups at the Mexican vault, the seeds that the center evacuated to Turkey and Lebanon, and those in Svalbard, '99.9 percent of its holdings are all outside Syria.' If most of the collection is safe, why request the Svalbard seeds and open the doomsday vault? Each one has a specialty-the Aleppo bank focuses on crops that grow in dry areas-and each one has been sending back-up samples to Svalbard since it opened in 2008.

It’s often called the “doomsday vault,” conjuring images of the sole survivors of a global disaster jumpstarting agriculture from scratch with the help of Svalbard’s frozen collection.īut Svalbard is just one part of a global network of seed banks, including the center based in Syria. The Svalbard vault’s job is to protect them from catastrophe, including nuclear war. These seeds are the product of 10,000 years or so of agriculture, history they hold in their genes. Now, its scientists hope to use the Svalbard samples to regenerate that collection outside of their war-torn home.īuilt beneath a mountain on an Arctic island halfway between Norway and the North Pole, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault currently stores over 800,000 seed samples from 5,100 species of crops and their wild relatives. For many years, the center housed its own seed bank near Aleppo, Syria.

This week the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas asked for the return of 325 little black boxes of seeds it had stored in the Svalbard vault. In the seven years since the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened, hundreds of thousands of seed samples have gone into its icy tombs.

Doomsday vault moon