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Learn more about the construction of the Svalbard Vault in Norway, which holds 1 million seeds to protect biodiversity
Sixteen years after its inauguration, after some repairs and expansions due to flooding, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault can boast the feat of storing more than a million seeds. A total of 60.000 different crop varieties from around the world have been added in recent years and remain frozen in the vault in the middle of the Arctic.
The Svalbard Boveda is built into a mountainside on the island of Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago, hence its name. It is halfway between Norway and the North Pole and was designed as a storage facility to protect vital crop seeds in the face of disasters.
To preserve the seeds inside, the vault is only opened on specific occasions. Despite this and the meticulousness with which it was built, it can also be affected by external agents. In 2017, the building suffered a flood due to the melting of the permafrost around it. The water entered the tunnel, but did not damage the seeds.
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In its latest renovations, the bóveda was waterproofed and the refrigeration equipment that keeps it at -18ºC was transferred to a nearby building so that the heat can dissipate better. Its creators believe it is designed to have an infinite useful life. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't need some maintenance from time to time.
Updating the collection
With the update of the vault, seeds from 36 different banks and institutions from around the world were deposited a few years ago. Pumpkin seeds deposited by the Cherokee Nation of the United States arrived, the original wheat from the University of Haifa in Israel, potatoes from Peru and all types of crops from Morocco, Mongolia and New Zealand, among others. Each of the introduced species is a sample of approximately 500 seeds.
Norway had to invest 10 million euros to repair and improve construction after a series of floods. Previously, to create the vault, the Norwegian government reported that they spent approximately 10 million dollars in 2008. Tens of millions of euros were invested by the government with the sole purpose of preserving terrestrial biodiversity.
Global warming, natural disasters or those caused by humans are some of the factors that gradually destroy the diversity of nature. In addition to eliminating this diversity, they can also destroy other seed banks around the world. This happened, for example, with the Aleppo seed bank during the war in Syria. As a result, in 2015 the first harvest of boveda seeds was carried out to replenish the Aleppo bank. The seeds were cultivated and re-deposited in the Svalbard boveda in 2017.
