Seed Vault (4 photos) Bashny.Net

February 26, 2008 not far from the Norwegian village Longyir the official opening of Svalbard Global Seed Vault - «Doomsday Vault" where Norwegians are going to keep the four and a half million seeds collected from around the world, in the event of any global catastrophe - a nuclear war, global warming or a collision with an asteroid. Storage is located in the interior of a large mountain, it leads to a tunnel length of 120 meters, special inserts and airtight doors which will protect the seed from any external influence. Storage will work in virtually offline, without staff - only once a year here will come a special team to check.


Cary Fowler (Cary Fowler), executive secretary of the Fund Global Crop Diversity: «We studied the distant future. We looked at the level of radiation in the grief and the stability of the geological structure of the area. We simulated climate change on the most catastrophic scenario for 200 years into the future, including the melting of ice sheets at both poles and in Greenland to verify that in this case, the selected site for the construction area will be above the level of the sea ».


Foundation repository will be updated regularly. Some cultures, biologists explain, can maintain their germination only for 20-30 years of storage, while others - tens or even hundreds of years.


Now there are about 1, 4000 these seed banks. But most of them can be affected by natural disasters, war or simply due to lack of funding. In contrast, the Norwegian project is devoid of these shortcomings. The Norwegian state has spent on the construction of the repository, which took about a year, $ 8 million.


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