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Doomsday vault syria6/29/2023 By 2013, approximately one-third of the general diversity stored in gene banks globally was represented at the Seed Vault. In here, someone aptly named it the world's most important room, the seeds are stored in vacuum-packed silver packets and test tubes in large plastic tole containers that are stacked on floor-to-ceiling metal shelving racks, each of the four-ply sealed envelopes containing some 500 copies of the same seed.Īpproximately 1,5 million distinct seed samples of agriculture crops are thought to exist, while the facility has a capacity to conserve 4,5 million. There are three vaults leading off from the chamber, but only one is currently in use. At the end of this corridor is a chamber, an added layer of security to protect the vaults containing the seeds. Through one door is a wide concrete tunnel illuminated by strip lighting and leading 130 meters down into the mountain. Inside, behind the huge steel the entrance leads to a small tunnel-like room filled with the loud whirring noise of electricity and cooling systems that keep the temperature within the vault consistent. On the contrary, an illuminated artwork by Norwegian artist Dyveke Sanne that runs the length of the building’s flat roof and down the front face of the concrete entry, celebrating the light in the Arctic, marks the location from a great distance, and acts like a beacon, in what looks like a Bond movie set, making the doomsday nickname seems eerily apt. Only the entrance to the facility is visible from the outside, but strangely enough, no effort has been made to keep the rectangular wedge of concrete that juts out starkly against the snowy landscape hidden. “It is away from the places on earth where you have war and terror, and everything maybe you are afraid of in other places.” says Bente Naeverdal, a property manager who oversees the day-to-day operation of the vault. It is the farthest north you can fly on a commercial airline, and apart from the nearby town of Longyearbyen, it is a vast white expanse of frozen emptiness.The vault's only neighbor is a similar and adjacent repository buried away in a nearby mine: the Arctic World Archive, which aims to provide a similar service for data to the world’s governments and private institutions, etched as code into reels of film that should last for a millennium. The facility was built deep in the bowels of an icy sandstone mountain on Spitsbergen, an island that is part of Norway's Svalbard archipelago, above the Arctic Circle, about 1,300 kilometers from the North Pole, It would have been difficult to find a place more remote. The idea of the vault was already conceived in the 1980s by conservationist Cary Fowler, in association with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), but only started to become reality after an International Seed Treaty negotiated by the U.N. “There are big and small doomsdays going on around the world every day.” - says Marie Haga, executive director of the Crop Trust, officially known as the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which plays a key role in the management of the vault. Mostly dubbed the “doomsday” vault and Food Ark, these nick names might conjures up an image of a reserve of seeds for use in case of an apocalyptic event or a global catastrophe in a distant future, but the vault was also and mainly designed to protect against much smaller, localized destruction and threats facing gene banks, such as losses caused by mismanagement, accident, equipment failures, or funding cuts. It preserves a wide variety of plant seeds that are duplicate samples, or "spare" copies, of seeds held in traditional gene banks and storehouses of agricultural biodiversity, and serves as a back up, safety net and refuge against accidental loss of diversity in case of crises. Opened in 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is essentially a huge safety deposit box. Woefully underfunded, many banks don't have the means to properly store or protect the seeds they hold. And a lack of resources is probably the biggest threat. Some have been hit by natural disasters, like the Philippine national gene bank, which was damaged by flooding from a typhoon and later by a fire. It is not just armed conflict that threatens gene banks. Gene banks in Afghanistan and Iraq have been destroyed, for example, while the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), a global agricultural-research organization that had been based in Syria, was recently also forced to flee its headquarters, just outside of Aleppo, because of the civil war, leaving behind one of the world’s most valuable seed collections, with some of the oldest varieties of wheat and barley. Yet many are located in politically or environmentally unstable countries. There are as many as 1750 ‘crop diversity’ collections all over the world, a global network that not only preserves, but also shares seeds to further agricultural research and develop new varieties.
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