Doomsday vault tunnelled into Arctic mountain to protect world's seeds

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
LONGYEARBYEN, Norway - It's built to withstand an earthquake, even a nuclear strike, but this is no high-tech military instalment.

Set deep in the permafrost of an Arctic mountain, Norway has built a "doomsday" vault to protect the world's seeds from global catastrophe. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was officially inaugurated Monday - less than a year after crews started drilling in Norway's Svalbard archipelago, about 1,000 kilometres from the North Pole.

The vault, which Norway built at a cost of about $9 million, has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the globe, shielding them from climate change, wars, natural disasters and other threats.

The vault is designed to be a fail-safe backup for the other 1,400 seed banks in the world, in case they are hit by disasters. War wiped out seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and another in the Philippines was flooded in the wake of a typhoon in 2006.

There are three separate chambers for storing seeds, each reached through a frost-covered metal door. Each 10-by-27 metre vault can accommodate 1.5 million sample packages - foil containers with 500 seeds each.

From the outside, only the entrance is visible. It resembles an elongated concrete tower capped by a glass artwork depicting frozen ice crystals.

Ahead of the opening, the entrance was decorated with igloo-like cubes of snow, and an ice sculpture of a polar bear. Seed vault worker Jimmy Olsen stood outside, a rifle slung over his shoulder.

"My job is to keep away people who aren't supposed to be here, and guard against polar bears," he said.

There are an estimated 3,000 polar bears on the islands.

The frozen mountain has been chilled further by giant air conditioning units to bring the temperature down to -18 Celsius. It's felt that many seeds could last 1,000 years at that temperature.

Reactions from around the world have been mostly positive, but the world spotlight brought by the seed bank has met a cool reception from some locals who treasure the isolation of the Arctic archipelago.

"We like to be here a little bit for ourselves," said Kai Tredal, 42, one of the roughly 2,000 residents of Svalbard's main town of Longyearbyen.

The Canadian Press, 2008