Monday, June 19, 2006

Norway plans to build a 'Doomsday' seed bank

The Norwegian governement is set to work in a cave on the ice-bound island of Spitsbergen to build a seed bank that will avert a world famine.


The "doomsday vault", is a vast top-security seed bank to ensure food supplies in the event of environmental catastrophe or nuclear war.

It will be designed to withstand global catastrophes like nuclear war or natural disasters that would destroy the planet's sources of food.

The "doomsday vault" is to hold around 2 million seeds, representing all known varieties of the world's crops.

There are currently about 1,400 seed banks around the world, but a large number of these are located in countries that are either politically unstable or that faced threats from the natural environment.

According to the New Scientist, The vault will have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete and will be protected behind two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors. It will not be permanently manned, but "the mountains are patrolled by polar bears", says Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international organisation promoting the project.

"This will be the world's most secure gene bank by some orders of magnitude," says Fowler. "But its seeds will only be used when all other samples have gone for some reason. It is a fail-safe depository, rather than a conventional seed bank."

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