The Errant Æsthete

A fascinating read out of Scientific American reports on a repository for 2.5 billion seeds that has been buried deep in the frozen earth on an Arctic mountainside in the Svalbard archipelago. A barren, treeless island in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard may prove to be the last, best hope of agriculture in warmer, more fertile parts of the world. The first batch of 100 million of the most important agricultural seeds were placed into the doomsday repository there today. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is buried deep within a frozen mountainside near the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen that perpetually cools it to –18 degrees Celsius (–0.4 degree Fahrenheit) with or without permafrost. Built to withstand all foreseeable disasters, including a recent earthquake that was the biggest in Norwegian history, it has room to protect at least 4.5 million samples (2.25 billion seeds) in its three man-made caverns.

In the vault’s cold isolation, the seeds can keep for hundreds and thousands of years—the grain sorghum alone can last for 20,000 years—effectively allowing agriculture to be restarted in the event of a global calamity, such as nuclear war or catastrophic climate change. But the vault will require some vestiges of human civilization to persist, if only to build the transportation to bring the seeds back out of their new icy home.