A resource essential to humanity’s future is hidden deep below the bowels of an ice mountain on an island above the Arctic Circle between Norway and the North Pole. It is seeds, not coal, oil, or valuable minerals.
The Global Seed Vault in Spitsbergen, part of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, contains millions of these little brown specks from more than 930,000 food crops. It’s practically a giant safe deposit box holding the world’s most extensive collection of agricultural biodiversity. “Inside this building is 13,000 years of agricultural history,” says Brian Lainoff, lead partnerships coordinator for the Crop Trust, which manages the vault, as he unlocks the giant steel door inside the mountain.
Svalbard’s arctic environment is as remote as it gets. It is the northernmost point you can fly on a commercial airline, and apart from the nearby town of Longyearbyen, it is a vast white expanse of frozen emptiness.
The worldwide Seed Vault has been termed the “doomsday” vault, implying that it is a reserve of seeds for use in an apocalyptic event or a worldwide catastrophe. However, the vault was built to protect against the much smaller, localized destruction and threats that gene banks face worldwide—which is why it was opened in February when TIME visited.
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On this occasion, samples from India, Pakistan, and Mexico were deposited alongside seeds from Syria, where many individuals are experiencing their apocalypse. Every day, both significant and minor doomsdays take place around the world. “Genetic material is being lost worldwide,” says the Crop Trust executive director Marie Haga. This past winter, the gene bank had the opportunity to rebalance the balance.
Near the facility’s entrance, a rectangular wedge of concrete that stands out starkly against the white environment, the doomsday term seemed frighteningly fitting. Svalbard was chosen as the vault’s site due to its isolation. “It is away from the regions on Earth where there is violence and terror, as well as everything else you may be scared of. It is in a safe location,” says Bente Naeverdal, a property manager in charge of the vault’s day-to-day operations.
Its lone neighbor is a similar archive buried away from the world’s dangers: the Arctic World Archive opened deep in a nearby mine on March 27 to preserve data for the world’s governments and commercial institutions.
The entrance opens into a narrow tunnel-like space filled with the loud spinning noise of electrical and cooling systems needed to keep the temperature within the vault steady. Through one door, a broad concrete tunnel lighted by strip lighting leads 430 feet into the mountain. At the end of this tunnel, a room serves as an additional layer of security for the vaults that house the seeds.
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Three vaults are going off from the chamber, but only one is currently in use. Its door is covered in a thick layer of ice, indicating that the temperature is below zero. The seeds are kept in vacuum-packed silver packets and test tubes in enormous boxes piled neatly on floor-to-ceiling shelves. The boxes have little monetary value, but they could hold the key to the future of global food security.
Agriculture methods have evolved considerably during the last 50 years, thanks to technical advancements that enable large-scale food production. However, as agricultural yields have expanded, biodiversity has declined to the point that only around 30 crops now meet 95% of human food-energy requirements. For example, just 10% of China’s varieties of rice from the 1950s are still in use today. Since 1900, the United States has lost more than 90% of its fruit and vegetable types. The monoculture aspect of agriculture makes the food supply more vulnerable to dangers such as disease and drought.
The seeds stored in the vault’s deep freeze include wild and old types, many of which are no longer widely used. Many do not exist outside of their original seed collections. However, the genetic diversity housed in the vault may give the DNA features required to create new strains for whatever challenges the world or a specific region will face. One of the 200,000 rice types in the vault may include the characteristic required to adapt rice to higher temperatures, for example, or to develop resistance to a new pest or disease. This is especially crucial given the problems of climate change.
“Not many think about crop diversity as fundamentally important, but it is. It is almost as important as water and air,” says Haga. “Seeds generally are the basis for everything. Not only what we eat, but what we wear, nature is all about us.”
There are up to 1,700 variants of the vault, known as gene banks, worldwide. This global network collects, stores, and distributes seeds to advance agricultural research and the development of new types. The Svalbard vault opened in 2008, serving as a backup storage facility for all those hundreds of thousands of types. Cary Fowler, a former executive director of the Crop Trust, developed the notion in the 1980s. Still, it didn’t become a reality until 2001, when the United Nations ratified an International Seed Treaty. The Norwegian government funded the construction and administered the vault in collaboration with the Crop Trust. The goal is to discover and house a duplicate of every unique seed in the worldwide gene banks; shortly, the vault will make room for its millionth variant.
A significant and symbolic gap has recently been filled at the end of one of the vault’s long rows of seeds. The black boxes there appear identical to those found elsewhere in the vault but have traveled significantly. The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) is a global agricultural research organization that was once situated in Syria but was forced to abandon its headquarters outside Aleppo due to the civil war. 2012, the organization evacuated its international workers while several Syrian researchers remained behind to salvage equipment and animals.
However, when the conflict intensified, they were compelled to abandon their gene bank, one of the world’s most precious seed collections containing some of the earliest wheat and barley varieties. ICARDA re-established its headquarters in Morocco and Lebanon, and the gene bank was reopened in 2015 with seeds from the Svalbard vault—the first withdrawal there. The seeds were awakened from their ice slumber and planted in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and Morocco, with their progeny carefully collected and processed before being returned to the vault. In late February, ICARDA returned the types of seeds it had removed.
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The gene bank in Aleppo was not the first to be threatened by conflict. Gene banks in Afghanistan and Iraq have been destroyed, as has all genetic material that was not backed up in Svalbard. However, armed conflict isn’t the sole threat to these abundant resources. Some have been impacted by natural disasters, such as the Philippine national gene bank, which was overrun by a typhoon and then burned. However, a lack of funding poses the most severe threat to the world’s gene banks.
Many organizations are woefully understaffed and have few means to adequately store or maintain the seeds they keep. The Crop Trust is now soliciting funds for an endowment fund to ensure that the world’s 1,700 gene bank facilities can continue as guardians of global biodiversity.
You don’t have to look far to see the sacrifices made to protect these kernels of reproduction. One of the most historically significant seed deposits inside the vault comes from the Vavilov Research Institute in St. Petersburg, one of the world’s oldest collections. During the siege of Leningrad, roughly a dozen scientists barricaded themselves in the chamber containing the seeds to keep them safe from starving residents and the surrounding German forces.
As the siege stretched on, several of them died of famine. Despite being surrounded by seeds and plant material, they refused to save themselves by eating any of them, believing the seeds were valuable in aiding Russia’s postwar recovery and protecting humanity’s future. One of the scientists, Dmitri Ivanov, is alleged to have perished while surrounded by bags of rice.
In an era of rising geopolitical tensions and uncertainty, the Svalbard Vault represents an uncommon and promising exercise in international cooperation for humanity’s sake. Any group or country can send seeds to it without limits based on politics or diplomatic requirements. North Korean red wooden boxes sit alongside American black boxes. Over on the next aisle, boxes of Ukrainian seeds rest above Russian seedlings.
“The seeds don’t care that there are North Korean and South Korean seeds in the same aisle,” Lainoff said. “They are cold and safe up there, and that’s all that matters.”