A police officer, foreground right, looks on, as last minute preparations are made inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Longyearbyen, Norway, Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2008. The "doomsday" seed vault built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters opened Tuesday deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. (AP Photo/John McConnico)
'Doomsday' Seed Vault Opens in Arctic
LONGYEARBYEN, Norway (AP) — Norway opened a frozen "doomsday" vault Tuesday deep within an Arctic mountain where millions of seeds will be stored to safeguard against wars or natural disasters wiping out food crops around the globe.
Biblical references repeatedly cropped up as guests at the opening ceremony carried the first seed deposits into the vault in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
"This is a frozen Garden of Eden," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said, standing in one of the frosty vaults against a backdrop of large discs made of ice.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg called the vault an "insurance policy" and added his own biblical comparison: "It is the Noah's Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations."
Svalbard Global Seed Vault, just 620 miles from the North Pole, is designed to house as many as 4.5 million crop seeds from all over the world. It is built to withstand global warming, earthquakes and even nuclear strikes.
The vault, built by the Norwegian government for $9.1 million, will operate like a bank box. Norway owns the bank, but the countries depositing seeds own them and can used them as needed free of charge.
Daily operations will be overseen by NorGen, a gene bank in an old coal mine on Svalbard that is jointly owned by the Nordic countries.
The vault will serve as a backup to the other 1,400 seed banks around the world, in case their deposits are lost. War wiped out seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and another bank in the Philippines was flooded in the wake of a typhoon in 2006.
"It is very important for Africa to store seeds here because anything can happen to our national seed banks," said 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai of Kenya. She is a board member of Global Crop Diversity Trust board, which collects the seeds for the Svalbard vault.
The group was founded by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and Biodiversity International, a Rome-based research group.
"Crop diversity will soon prove to be our most potent and indispensable resource for addressing climate change, water and energy supply constraints, and for meeting the food needs of a growing population," said Cary Fowler, head of the trust.
Stoltenberg and Maathai made the first deposit in the vault — a box of rice seeds from 104 countries. Guests at the ceremony carried dozens of other boxes through the steel and concrete-lined tunnel leading to the vaults.
The seeds are packed in silvery foil containers — as many as 500 in each sample — and placed on blue and orange metal shelves inside three 32-by-88-foot storage chambers. Each vault can hold 1.5 million sample packages of all types of crop seeds, from carrots to wheat.
Svalbard is cold, but giant air conditioning units have chilled the vault further to -0.4 degrees, a temperature at which experts say many seeds could last for 1,000 years.
After the ceremony, Stoltenberg and Barroso took a three-hour helicopter tour of the remote region. They landed on a vast glacier and stopped at the research stations of Ny-Aalesund, some 60 miles northwest of Longyearbyen, the main settlement on Svalbard.
Stoltenberg told reporters that he wanted Barroso to see the effects of climate change in the form of melting ice.
Barroso said such melting glaciers show that "we see the need to act ... to avoid real challenges to balance in the life of our planet."
Artist's conception of the vault.
The entrance to the vault.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a vault containing millions of seeds from all over the world, saw its first deposits on Tuesday. Located 800 kilometers from the North Pole on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, the vault has been referred to by European Commission president José Manuel Barroso as a "frozen Garden of Eden". It is intended to preserve crop supplies and secure biological diversity in the event of a worldwide disaster.

"The opening of the seed vault marks a historic turning point in safeguarding the world’s crop diversity," said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust which is in charge of collecting the seed samples. The Norwegian government, who owns the bank, built it at a cost of $9.1 million. 

At the opening ceremony, 100 million seeds from 268,000 samples were placed inside the vault, where there is room for over 2 billion seeds. Each of the samples originated from a different farm or field, in order to best ensure biological diversity. These crop seeds included such staples as rice, potatoes, barley, lettuce, maize, sorghum, and wheat. No genetically modified crops were included. (Beyond politics they are generally sterile so of no use.)

Constructed deep inside a mountain and protected by concrete walls, the "doomsday vault" is designed to withstand earthquakes, nuclear warfare, and floods resulting from global warming. Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg called it an "insurance policy" against such threats.

With air-conditioned temperatures of -18 degrees Celsius, experts say the seeds could last for an entire millennium. Some crops will be able to last longer, like sorghum, which the Global Crop Diversity Trust says can last almost 20 millenniums. Even if the refrigeration system fails, the vaults are expected to stay frozen for 200 years.

The Prime Minister said, "With climate change and other forces threatening the diversity of life that sustains our planet, Norway is proud to be playing a central role in creating a facility capable of protecting what are not just seeds, but the fundamental building blocks of human civilization." Stoltenberg, along with Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai, made the first deposit of rice to the vault.

"It is very important for Africa to store seeds here because anything can happen to our national seed banks," Maathai said. The vault will operate as a bank, allowing countries to use their deposited seeds free of charge. It will also serve as a backup to the thousands of other seed banks around the world.

"Crop diversity will soon prove to be our most potent and indispensable resource for addressing climate change, water and energy supply constraints and for meeting the food needs of a growing population," Cary Fowler said.