Inside the hidden ‘doomsday’ vault that’s designed to save humanity
Topics: News, Science, Environment, Climate Change
Joe Yates
Featured Image Credit: JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP via Getty Images
Topics: News, Science, Environment, Climate Change
A vault hidden away in a frozen landscape of a remote Arctic island could one day save humanity, if anything disastrous were to happen.
It is positioned on Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago located so far north that winter brings three months of complete darkness, while summer brings the 'midnight sun' - meaning it's light outside 24 hours a day.
While the island is around the same size as Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire put together, there are only 2,504 people living on it - according to a 2022 Census - making it the perfect place to build a doomsday vault.
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The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is surrounded by glaciers and frozen tundra and houses seeds, if the name didn’t already give it away, yet little is known about what is inside it - that is until recent years, as rare footage has shown a glimpse into the hidden storage facility.
As you walk in, you're greeted by a hallway, with a double door leading you through to futuristic-looking tunnel with wires and pipes neatly positioned on your left and right, which takes you through to a concrete room.
A doorway dead ahead of you will take you through to another door that looks like it would lead into the vault. Instead, it takes you to a spacious room with three shiny metal doors - inside each of them is a 'seed chamber'.
Inside the room, there are shelves with crates of seeds inside them from depositors from all around the world.
Each seed chamber is around 31.2 feet to 32.8 feet in width, and 19.7ft high, and they are roughly 88.6ft long.
The project is managed by the Norwegian government, the Crop Trust non-profit organization and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center.
According to the Crop Trust website: "The Seed Vault safeguards duplicates of 1,214,827 seed samples from almost every country in the world, with room for millions more. Its purpose is to backup genebank collections to secure the foundation of our future food supply."
The page also explains why the storage of millions of seeds can ensure the future of humanity, should anything cause the world to fall into disarray.
“Worldwide, more than 1,700 genebanks hold collections of food crops for safekeeping, yet many of these are vulnerable, exposed not only to natural catastrophes and war, but also to avoidable disasters, such as lack of funding or poor management. Something as mundane as a poorly functioning freezer can ruin an entire collection,” the page explained.