The idea surfaced over a decade ago. It was appealing and odd at the same time: gather a team of expert scientists, drill a 120-yard-long tunnel into the side of a frigid mountain, equip it with all manner of new technology and then place precious seeds from all around the world inside.
By doing so, the thinking went, agriculture would be protected from disasters, diversity of plant life would be saved and everyone would breathe a bit easier. And so the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the largest seed depository in the world, was built on a remote Norwegian island and the seed collections began to arrive.
Cary Fowler, an agriculture-steeped Tennessean turned executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, oversaw the process.
When the project was still in the planning stages, Fowler spoke not only of the protection the vault would offer in doomsday scenarios but the fact that it had brought humankind together for a common cause.
Certainly, agriculture was always in our blood.”
Most seed samples were held in seed banks around the world. Most people don’t realize, but virtually every country in the world has one or more seed banks. They store gigantic quantities of crop diversity in the form of seed, and it’s absolutely essential for agricultural progress for improvements in crop breeding programs.Losses occurred because facilities sometimes lacked proper funding or equipment. Other times losses happened due to warfare or a natural disaster. Every time these things happened, agriculture was experiencing loss. We were seeing unique varieties of agriculture crops simply lost. Any unique or important trait those seed samples might have had was gone forever.
With the world we live in today — increased need for production in the face of population growth, and with weather variability — this loss was unacceptable. We need the seed resources because they provide options for agriculture in the future. We wanted to put an end to the loss of this genetic diversity and that was the motivation behind establishing the seed vault.”
“There were two important factors behind it. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Finland, have a collective seed bank located in Sweden. In the 1980s, they put some of their seed samples in an abandoned coal mine in Svalbard.
I didn’t think of it in historic terms. It’s true that there hadn’t been anything like it before, but to me, this was the next logical step to conserve diversity make it available for plant researchers and breeders now and in the future…
A remote and cold location was only one factor in making a successful facility. There were potential spots in the Andes or Himalayas. With Norway, we had a trusted country internationally. They were also willing to finance the facility, backed by their own political and financial stability.”
If you want to conserve seed for a long time, there are two important factors. You want to dry it and reduce the moisture content, and you want to freeze it, ideally down to -18 C. When you do both of those, it reduces the biological activity in the seed, slowing down the aging process. Certainly different seeds will react differently to such regimes. At the low end, seeds with high oil content should be viable for decades to hundreds of years. But for something on the high end, like sorghum, you’re talking longevity of almost 20,000 years.
With those lengths of time, people get the wrong idea and think of the seed vault as a time capsule where you put seeds in the vault and walk away. It’s not that at all but rather a living institution with things going in and out. Those estimates about how long particular seeds will last are useful to know, but in reality, when seed banks around the world use up supplies, it’s because they’re constantly giving samples to researchers. Diminished supplies force seed to be taken out and grown in order to replenish stock. When they get their new seed, they send a portion to Svalbard.
The tunnels are chiseled from solid stone. With sprayed concrete-plastic fiber on the walls to keep small stones and debris from falling. It also provided a bit more light against a darker stone. It does have a concrete and asphalt floor, but the rooms with the seed are also chiseled from solid rock, coated with the concrete spray.
When you walk in the front door, it begins to get progressively colder as you walk down the tunnel. At the tunnel terminus, it’s a steady -4.5 or -5 C. We’ve lowered that with compressors to -18 for seed storage.
“If we had refrigeration problems, it would take a seriously long time for the facility to warm to -4.5 C. We’d basically have 30 years to fix the equipment before we’d even begin to have problems with the seed. Power comes from the village electrical grid powered by locally-mined coal.”
“The facility is not staffed on a daily basis. Local officials check on it virtually every day, but it is monitored remotely. Several times a year new seed shipments come in, but otherwise we don’t really need to be there. That was part of the design: take advantage of the cold and reduce the human involvement. Humans make mistakes; stupidity comes into play.
“The annual upkeep is very small — maybe in the $200,000-range. The natural resource within is the most valuable in the world, but the insurance cost is less than what a small art museum carries.
“We have three vault rooms at the end of the tunnel. There are only seeds in one room. We built this to last forever and have plenty of room for expansion.
“Air-locked doors lead from the tunnel to an incredibly cold room with eight rows of shelving filled with sealed boxes — roughly the size of a packing box. The seed samples are in heat-sealed, foil packages. Each package holds 400 to 500 seeds and each box holds 400 to 500 packages.
“At the moment, there are samples from 834,000 crop varieties. We have over 100,000 varieties of rice and over 100,000 varieties of wheat.”
