Inside The eDoomsdayf Vault
By jennifer
duggan / spitsbergen
Deep in the bowels of an icy mountain on an
island above the Arctic Circle between Norway and the North Pole lies a
resource of vital importance for the future of humankind. Itfs not coal, oil
or precious minerals, but seeds.
Millions of these tiny brown specks, from more than 930,000 varieties of food crops, are stored in the Global Seed Vault on Spitsbergen, part of Norwayfs Svalbard archipelago. It is essentially a huge safety deposit box, holding the worldfs largest collection of agricultural biodiversity. gInside this building is 13,000 years of agricultural history,h says Brian Lainoff, lead partnerships coordinator of the Crop Trust, which manages the vault, as he hauls open the huge steel door leading inside the mountain.
It would be difficult to find a place more
remote than the icy wilderness of Svalbard. 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 Global Seed Vault has been dubbed the
gdoomsdayh vault, which conjures up an image of a reserve of seeds for use in
case of an apocalyptic event or a global catastrophe. But it is the much
smaller, localized destruction and threats facing gene banks all over the world
that the vault was designed to protect against—and itfs why the vault was
opened in February, when TIME visited.
On this occasion, samples from India,
Pakistan and Mexico were being deposited alongside seeds from Syria, many of
whose citizens are living through their own apocalypse. gThere are big and
small doomsdays going on around the world every day. Genetic material is being
lost all over the globe,h says Marie Haga, executive
director of the Crop Trust. This past winter offered the gene bank a chance to
redress the balance.
Near the entrance to the facility, a
rectangular wedge of concrete that juts out starkly against the snowy
landscape, the doomsday nickname seems eerily apt. It was precisely for its
remoteness that Svalbard was chosen as the location of the vault. gIt is away
from the places on earth where you have war and terror, everything maybe you
are afraid of in other places. It is situated in a safe place,h says Bente Naeverdal, a property manager
who oversees the day-to-day operation of the vault.
Its only neighbor is a similar repository buried away from the dangers of the world: the Arctic World Archive, which aims to preserve data for the worldfs governments and private institutions, opened deep in a nearby mine on March 27.
The entrance leads to a small tunnel-like
room filled with the loud whirring noise of electricity and cooling systems
required to keep the temperature within the vault consistent. Through one door
is a wide concrete tunnel illuminated by strip lighting leading 430 ft. down
into the mountain. At the end of this corridor is a chamber, an added layer of
security to protect the vaults containing the seeds.
There are three vaults leading off from the
chamber, but only one is currently in use, and its door is covered in a thick
layer of ice, hinting at the subzero temperatures inside. In here, the seeds
are stored in vacuum-packed silver packets and test tubes in large boxes that
are neatly stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves. They have very little monetary
value, but the boxes potentially hold the keys to the future of global food
security.
Over the past 50 years, agricultural practices have changed dramatically, with technological advances allowing large-scale crop production. But while crop yields have increased, biodiversity has decreased to the point that now only about 30 crops provide 95% of human food-energy needs. Only 10% of the rice varieties that China used in the 1950s are still used today, for example. The U.S. has lost over 90% of its fruit and vegetable varieties since the 1900s. This monoculture nature of agriculture leaves food supplies more susceptible to threats such as diseases and drought.
The seeds lying in the deep freeze of the
vault include wild and old varieties, many of which are not in general use
anymore. And many donft exist outside of the seed collections they came from.
But the genetic diversity contained in the vault could provide the DNA traits
needed to develop new strains for whatever challenges the world or a particular
region will face in the future.One of the 200,000
varieties of rice within the vault could have the trait needed to adapt rice to
higher temperatures, for example, or to find resistance to a new pest or
disease. This is particularly important with the challenges of climate change.
gNot too many think about crop diversity as being so fundamentally important,
but it is. It is almost as important as water and air,h says Haga. gSeeds generally are the basis for everything. Not
only what we eat, but what we wear, nature all about us.h
There are as many as 1,700 versions of the
vault, called gene banks, all over the world. This global network collects,
preserves and shares seeds to further agricultural research and develop new
varieties. The Svalbard vault was opened in 2008, effectively as a backup
storage unit for all those hundreds of thousands of varieties. The idea was
conceived in the 1980s by Cary Fowler, a former executive director of the Crop
Trust, but only started to become reality after an International Seed Treaty
negotiated by the U.N. was signed in 2001. Construction was funded by the
Norwegian government, which operates the vault in partnership with the Crop
Trust. The goal is to find and house a copy of every unique seed that exists in
the global gene banks; soon the vault will make room for its millionth variety.
It also works in tandem with those gene banks when their material is lost or
destroyed.
At the end of one of the long rows of seeds inside the vault, a large and symbolic gap has only just been refilled. The black boxes there look like all the others in the vault, but they have had a long journey. The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) is a global agricultural-research organization that had been based in Syria but was forced to flee its headquarters, just outside of Aleppo, because of the civil war. The organization evacuated its international staff in 2012, but some Syrian researchers stayed behind to rescue equipment and even animals.
But as the fighting intensified, they were
forced to leave behind their gene bank, one of the worldfs most valuable
collections of seeds, containing some of the oldest varieties of wheat and
barley. ICARDA re-established its headquarters in Morocco and Lebanon, and
restarted the gene bank in 2015 using seeds from the Svalbard vault—the
first-ever withdrawal there. Woken from their icy slumber, the seeds were
planted in Lebanonfs Bekaa Valley and in Morocco, and
their offspring were carefully collected and processed to return to the vault.
In late February, ICARDA returned the varieties of seeds it had taken out.
gThese seeds have come full circle,h Lainoff
explains.
The gene bank in Aleppo was not the first
to be threatened by war. Gene banks in Afghanistan and Iraq have been
destroyed, along with them genetic material that wasnft backed up in Svalbard.
But it is not just armed conflict that threatens these valuable resources. Some
have been hit by natural disasters, like the Philippine national gene bank,
which was damaged by flooding from a typhoon and later a fire. But a lack of
resources is probably the biggest threat facing the worldfs gene banks.
Woefully underfunded, many lack the resources to properly store or protect the seeds they hold. The Crop Trust is now raising money for an endowment fund to ensure that the worldfs 1,700 gene-bank facilities are able to continue acting as guarantors of global biodiversity.
You donft need to look far to discover the
sacrifices made to keep these kernels of reproduction safe. One of the most
historically significant deposits of seeds inside the vault comes from a
collection in St. Petersburgfs Vavilov Research
Institute, which originates from one of the first collections in the world.
During the siege of Leningrad, about a dozen scientists barricaded themselves
in the room containing the seeds in order to protect them from hungry citizens
and the surrounding German army.
As the siege dragged on, a number of them
eventually died from starvation. Despite being surrounded by seeds and plant
material, they steadfastly refused to save themselves by eating any of it, such
was their conviction about the importance of the seeds to aid Russiafs recovery
after war and to help protect the future of humankind. One of the scientists, Dmitri
Ivanov, is said to have died surrounded by bags of rice.
In an age of heightened geopolitical
tensions and uncertainty, the Svalbard vault is an unusual and hopeful exercise
in international cooperation for the good of humankind. Any organization or
country can send seeds to it, and there are no restrictions because of politics
or the requirements of diplomacy. Red wooden boxes from North Korea sit
alongside black boxes from the U.S. Over on the next aisle, boxes of seeds from
Ukraine sit atop seeds from Russia. gThe seeds donft care that there are North
Korean seeds and South Korean seeds in the same aisle,h Lainoff
says. gThey are cold and safe up there, and thatfs all that really matters.h
Reporting for this article was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting