Noah's Ark

The government of Norway revealed a project today to build a doomsday vault for the seeds of the world.

It is to be carved deep into frozen rock on an island not far from the North Pole and act like a Noah's Ark for nearly every food crop of every country.

This will safeguard the agricultural heritage of the planet in the face of increasing global environmental changes.

"The Norwegian government hopes to contribute to combating the loss of biological diversity, to reduce our vulnerability to climatic changes, and to enhance our ability to secure future food production," said Norway's minister of agriculture and food Terje Riis-Johansen.

"Every day that passes, we lose crop biodiversity," said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust. For instance, of the 7,100 named varieties of apples grown in the United States in the 1800s, more than 6,800 no longer exist.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust is helping to fund the vault's operations and pay for the transport of seeds to the Arctic Isle of Svalbard.


The island was chosen for the vault in part because its ground is perpetually frozen.





Project architects also considered how to offset any potential impacts that worst-case scenarios of global warming might have on the island.

For instance, the vault is located roughly 425 feet above sea level.

This puts it well above a roughly 20-foot rise in sea level that would accompany the melting of Greenland's ice sheet, or even a 200-foot rise that would come with an unlikely total meltdown of Antarctica.

Researchers also saw the deeper the vault was, the colder it would remain. To help keep the seeds safely refrigerated, the vault will be located nearly 400 feet into the side of a mountain, ensuring that rising outside air temperatures will not influence the surrounding permafrost.

At the end of this tunnel, the project will build two chambers capable of holding a total of three million seed samples, making it the largest such seed bank in the world.

"Even climate change over the next 200 years will not significantly affect the permafrost temperature," said project manager Magnus Bredeli Tveiten, with the Norwegian government's directorate of public construction and property.

While scientists are not sure what the precise impacts of potential climate changes might be, "we certainly know it's going to have a major impact on certain growing areas and affect the diversity in the field," Fowler said. "So climate change will both pose a threat to the diversity we have, and make that diversity much more valuable."

The project's cornerstone was laid in June 2006. Construction is set to start in March 2007 and to finish in September 2007, with an official opening planned in late winter 2008.

Your "Johnny Appleseed" Scribe;
Allan W Janssen