Noah’s ark for crop seeds opens in Arctic Norway

Tue Feb 26, 2008 7:28am EST

By John Acher
LONGYEARBYEN, Norway, Feb 26 (Reuters) - Norway launched a Noah’s ark of the plant kingdom on Tuesday to protect crop seeds, among mankind’s most valuable resources, from cataclysm inside an Arctic mountainside.

Blasted out of icy rock 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the air-locked vaults would stay frozen for 200 years even in the worst-case scenario of global warming and if mechanical refrigeration were to fail, officials said.

Initially 100 million seeds from more than 100 countries have been sent for safekeeping at the $10 million facility which holds 268,000 seed samples, each from a different farm or field.

“Biological diversity is under threat from the forces of nature … and from the actions of man,” Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said at the opening ceremony.

“The seed vault is our insurance policy” against threats such as war, natural disasters or climate change, he said.

Dubbed a doomsday vault, the cavern in the Svalbard archipelago off the northern tip of Norway is a backup storage for seeds from gene banks around the globe.

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