Norway opens Arctic Noah's ark to protect seeds
By John Acher
LONGYEARBYEN, Norway, Feb 26 (Reuters) - Norway launched a Noah's ark of the plant kingdom on Tuesday that will protect crop seeds, one of mankind's most precious resources, from natural disaster inside an Arctic mountainside.
Blasted out of icy rock 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the air-locked vaults would stay frozen for 200 years even in the worst-case scenario of global warming and if mechanical refrigeration were to fail, officials said.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said the storage would guard "the fundamental building blocks of human civilisation" from forces, including climate change, threatening the "diversity of life that sustain our planet".
Dubbed a doomsday vault, the cavern in the Svalbard archipelago off the northern tip of Norway is a backup storage for seeds from gene banks around the globe.
Initially 100 million seeds from more than 100 countries have been sent for safekeeping at the $10 million facility which holds 268,000 distinct seed samples, each from a different farm or field.
The deposits range from major African and Asian staples such as rice, maize, wheat, cowpea and sorghum to European and South American varieties of eggplant, lettuce, barley and potato.
"We will have a major (seed) collection here, one of the biggest in the world, from the opening day," Cary Fowler, head of the Global Crop Diversity Trust which is funding the operations of the vault, told Reuters.
Stoltenberg and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist, put the first box of rice seed in the vault at an inauguration ceremony also attended by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.
ENDING EXTINCTION
"The conditions down here in the vault are perfect," Fowler said inside the gently sloping steel tube tunnel leading down to the three vault rooms that will be able to house 4.5 million samples, some 2 billion seeds.
"In the past, when accidents or natural disasters or war intervened and destroyed samples, then that was it -- they were as dead as a dinosaur, extinct," Fowler told Reuters.
"But we are going to put an end to extinction with this vault because we are going to have a safety backup, a Plan B."
Seeds deposited in the vault remain the property of the depositors, which include the world's major gene banks in developing countries.
During a visit to the site on Monday, whirring freezer equipment added an extra chill to the first vault room to be opened. The seeds will be kept at a storage temperature of minus 18-20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit).
Barley can survive 2,000 years, wheat 1,700 and sorghum almost 20,000 years under such conditions, the Trust said.
If the freezers failed, the permafrost would keep the cavern at around minus 4 Celsius, allowing time for repairs.
"I like having a Plan B to our Plan B," Fowler said. (Editing by Robert Woodward)
LONGYEARBYEN, Norway, Feb 26 (Reuters) - Norway launched a Noah's ark of the plant kingdom on Tuesday that will protect crop seeds, one of mankind's most precious resources, from natural disaster inside an Arctic mountainside.
Blasted out of icy rock 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the air-locked vaults would stay frozen for 200 years even in the worst-case scenario of global warming and if mechanical refrigeration were to fail, officials said.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said the storage would guard "the fundamental building blocks of human civilisation" from forces, including climate change, threatening the "diversity of life that sustain our planet".
Dubbed a doomsday vault, the cavern in the Svalbard archipelago off the northern tip of Norway is a backup storage for seeds from gene banks around the globe.
Initially 100 million seeds from more than 100 countries have been sent for safekeeping at the $10 million facility which holds 268,000 distinct seed samples, each from a different farm or field.
The deposits range from major African and Asian staples such as rice, maize, wheat, cowpea and sorghum to European and South American varieties of eggplant, lettuce, barley and potato.
"We will have a major (seed) collection here, one of the biggest in the world, from the opening day," Cary Fowler, head of the Global Crop Diversity Trust which is funding the operations of the vault, told Reuters.
Stoltenberg and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist, put the first box of rice seed in the vault at an inauguration ceremony also attended by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.
ENDING EXTINCTION
"The conditions down here in the vault are perfect," Fowler said inside the gently sloping steel tube tunnel leading down to the three vault rooms that will be able to house 4.5 million samples, some 2 billion seeds.
"In the past, when accidents or natural disasters or war intervened and destroyed samples, then that was it -- they were as dead as a dinosaur, extinct," Fowler told Reuters.
"But we are going to put an end to extinction with this vault because we are going to have a safety backup, a Plan B."
Seeds deposited in the vault remain the property of the depositors, which include the world's major gene banks in developing countries.
During a visit to the site on Monday, whirring freezer equipment added an extra chill to the first vault room to be opened. The seeds will be kept at a storage temperature of minus 18-20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit).
Barley can survive 2,000 years, wheat 1,700 and sorghum almost 20,000 years under such conditions, the Trust said.
If the freezers failed, the permafrost would keep the cavern at around minus 4 Celsius, allowing time for repairs.
"I like having a Plan B to our Plan B," Fowler said. (Editing by Robert Woodward)
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