Svalbard - Global Seed Vault (28 photos)

The 1000 km from the North Pole. The permafrost was to build a super-mega store. For seed. In the event of a nuclear war and other disasters. Finance the construction of serious people (other than the Government of Norway), Bill Gates, for example.



Seeds are collected from around the world and can be stored for 1,000 years. The temperature in storage -18 ° C. If denied refrigerators, storage will continue to work, because It is located in the permafrost.



Svalbard Global Seed Vault is not a gene bank. It - guarantee storage, where on behalf of various genetic duplicates of banks saved seed varieties. Take the seeds out of the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard will be possible only if stored in the original seed funds for one reason or another will be lost.



Party deposited seeds in Svalbard, retains ownership of them. Neither the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, nor Norway will have the right to prevent someone in the warehouse funds without the permission of the depositors. Upon request, the depositors seeds will be returned to her.



Storage is designed to deposit 3 million different types of seeds. Since each type is represented by a sample containing about 500 seeds, the granary will be able to accommodate a maximum of about 1, 5 billion individual seeds.



Therefore, this granary will be able to save all of the unique types of seeds stored today in gene banks, whose number is about 1400, and which are located around the globe in more than 100 countries. In addition, this silo is capable of storing samples of the new type of seeds to be collected in the future.



When the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard will be used to full capacity, it will be the largest global fund seed.