Where is one of the largest seed banks in the world located? Doomsday World Warehouse (19 photos).

The Svalbard Globale frøhvelv (Norwegian: Svalbard Globale frøhvelv) is a storage tunnel on the island of Svalbard that stores seed samples of major crops for safe storage.

The Doomsday Vault is a figurative name for the World Seed Vault located in Svalbard. The Norwegians, the initiators of the project, have set themselves an ambitious task - to provide a strategic supply of plant seeds from all over the world in case of a global catastrophe. Whether people will provoke the death of the green shell of the Earth or it will be caused by external forces - it does not matter: a powerful structure will withstand any cataclysms. It is no coincidence that the dry official name was quickly replaced by the bright metaphor of "Doomsday", because the contents of the vault will become in demand when the main part of humanity ceases to exist.

Vault history

In the 20th century, mankind did everything so that their descendants would have something to do in the next 200 years. The emergence of nuclear weapons, large-scale man-made disasters, global climate change associated with the melting of ice at the poles - together or individually, these causes can cause irreversible consequences for terrestrial vegetation. Scientists decided that the inhabitants of our planet should be able to quickly restore lost species in order to provide the usual air composition and food for the entire population.

Construction of the entrance to the seed storage

Vault entry

In the second half of the 20th century, buildings guaranteeing the safety of seeds were built in all developed countries of the world. The Svalbard project has become a fundamentally new step in the development of a thoughtful idea. According to the authors, who have calculated all the options for the development of human history, the repository should be something like a bank room with cells where each state will place duplicate seeds from its national funds. If a disaster occurs in the homeland of the plant, there will always be hope for the northern reserves. The idea was highly appreciated by international financial funds and, together with the Norwegian government, they invested almost $10 million in it. Construction began in 2006, and already in 2008 the storage received the first batch of seeds.

Why Svalbard?

There were two reasons for choosing the island - geographical, more significant, and political. The climatic disadvantages of the archipelago turned into pluses in predicting the success of the project. In permafrost conditions, due to which Svalbard does not even have its own cemetery, it is easier to ensure the safety of stocks in the event of a breakdown of all equipment and lower energy costs for maintenance of equipment. The facility was built at an altitude of 130 m above sea level. This ensures that a potential global flood, which will be provoked by the melting ice of the Arctic and Antarctic, will bypass it. The region lies outside the seismic hazard zone, so earthquakes do not threaten the reinforced concrete bunker either. The western coast of Spitsbergen is located outside the zones comfortable for people to live, but it is not as far from the densely populated centers of civilization as, for example, the northern regions of Russia, and even in the event of a transport collapse it will not be difficult to get to it.

Doomsday Vault

Hallway

Tunnel

main hall

The place where the seeds are stored

From a political point of view, Svalbard is ideal for international projects. Formally belonging to Norway, the island received a special status in 1920. Since then, its subsoil can be developed by about 50 states that have become parties to the agreement. Due to the difficult climate, only Norwegians and Russians are now among those who want to mine coal here, but many years of experience in international cooperation can be used to implement a new project.

Object design

A rock has become a natural body of the storage, the hermetic entrance to it is reinforced with meter-thick reinforced concrete walls that can withstand even a direct hit from a nuclear warhead. To get inside, to a 120-meter depth, the guest needs to go through the airlock. Then the visitor, who has passed the concrete corridor, is waiting for spacious halls, where he will experience a year-round temperature shock at the level of −18 °C. Always-on refrigeration units help to achieve such indicators. In the event of a simultaneous breakdown of all equipment, the temperature will only slightly rise in a few weeks, so the seeds will retain the ability to germinate until people get to them. Each country has its own section in the storage, and you can work in it only with the official permission of the authorities of the “contributor” state. Seeds wrapped in foil are laid out in plastic bags and then packed in containers standing on the shelves. Motion sensors monitor any actions of people inside, excluding sabotage.

Doomsday Vault Diagram

A) Entry

B) Hermetic lock system

C) Shelving with containers in the seed storage compartment

D) Box with packages of seeds

E) Sealed bag with seeds

What is stored in the bunker today

The Doomsday Vault, designed for 4.5 million tons of seeds, is still far from being completely filled. The project participants send here 500 seeds of one name, preference is given to agricultural crops. Although only 150 species of plants come to the table for earthlings, 12 of which are the most popular cereals, but each of them includes thousands of varieties. The object will not become an absolute salvation of the green cover of the Earth, but it will ensure the safety of the achievements of mankind, with its research and constant selection, which has greatly increased the diversity of the plant world.

Modern Art

Norwegian law states that any public building that is funded by the government and exceeds a certain value must be of value as a piece of art. Usually the artwork is within the building, but the World Seed Vault is a special safe place that ordinary people cannot visit. KORO, an agency that looks after the spread of art in public spaces, brought in Dyvek Sann to highlight the beauty and majesty of arctic light in the vault's design. The artist made the art element stand out by placing it on the roof and front of the entrance to the Doomsday Vault.

vault roof

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Facade of the Doomsday Vault

The facade and roof of the building are decorated with steel reflective triangles of various sizes. They are complemented by prisms and illuminated mirrors. The futuristic composition reflects polar light during the summer months, while in the winter, a network of 200 fiber optic cables colors the seed vault in muted greenish turquoise and white. Due to the color overflows and the play of light, which only enhances the snow lying around, the building is interesting to look at near and from afar, at different times of the day and year. The object symbolizes the diversity of life that is hidden in the vault and reflected to the whole world through a large prism.

Information for tourists

The Doomsday Vault is one of the sights that are more pleasant to read about while sitting at a computer than to watch them with your own eyes. A difficult climate with positive temperatures only in July-August, an abundance of short-term precipitation, sharp gusts of wind, frequent fogs are a good reason to abandon walks around the island in favor of a virtual trip. There is another reason: access to strategic reserves is open only to scientists who have received special permission from their government. Of course, the press was invited to the opening, but since then, genetics and breeders have been mainly interested in the contents of the object. No one is forbidden to look at the entrance to the vault from the outside, but the sight will not be very educational: a small bridge will lead visitors from a compact parking lot to massive doors at the base of a narrow gray rectangle that goes straight into the rock. The prosaic nature of the landscape is brightened up during the Polar Night, when ice crystals sparkle at the top of the entrance.

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Seed containers

Seed bags

The vault and its surroundings

How to get to the object

Formally, the Doomsday Vault is located on the territory of the town of Longyearbyen. This modest village with rows of colorful houses and only 2,000 inhabitants is the official capital of the archipelago. In fact, the facility was built at a distance of about a kilometer south of the runway of the local airport, and the nearest housing from here is another 3 km in an easterly direction. Domestic tourists can go to Svalbard without a visa if they somehow get on a flight carrying shift workers from Russia. The rest of the travelers prefer to come here by plane from the largest cities in Norway - Oslo and Tromsø. In recent decades, summer sea cruises along the coast of the northern part of the country have become popular. Another way to fully enjoy the virtues of the archipelago is to enter the Svalbard International University, opened right in Longyearbyen. It trains specialists in biology, geology, geophysics of the Arctic, engineers working in the Far North. The training program is distinguished by an abundance of field practice hours in extreme conditions that require remarkable health from students.

Travel Precautions in Svalbard

Watch out for polar bears!

The lack of people on the island more than compensates for the abundance of polar bears, who are not afraid to enter the territory of villages and tourist camps. Indigenous people go for a walk with guns, the first classes of university students begin with shooting training. If a bear is seen in sight, a person needs to leave the danger zone as soon as possible, sometimes helicopters are sent to help potential victims. In the event of an immediate threat to life, it is allowed to kill predators, but in the future, the governor of Spitsbergen will personally investigate the incident, determining whether the limits of necessary self-defense have been exceeded. Those who are not afraid of either frost, or animals, or the scarcity of architectural impressions from a visit to the Doomsday Vault will receive unforgettable impressions from the harsh northern landscape. Rocks descending to the water, snow caps on the opposite bank of the Adventfjord, only giving way to rare grass in summer, calm sea and cheerful houses of all colors of the rainbow - this will remain in the memory of travelers who climbed the mountain to the entrance to the vault, Svalbard.

TASS-DOSIER. 10 years ago, on February 26, 2008, the grand opening of the World Seed Vault took place on the island of Western Svalbard near the city of Longyearbyen (Norway).

The goal of the project is to preserve the seed material of all agricultural plants existing in the world in case of natural or man-made disasters.

Story

The world's first seed bank, a special fund for storing seeds, was created at the suggestion of the Soviet plant breeder Pyotr Lisitsyn: he managed to interest the head of the Soviet state Vladimir Lenin in this idea. The corresponding decree, "On seed production", was signed on June 13, 1921. In accordance with the decree, the State Sortsemfond was established. In the 1920s, the fund developed as a state reserve in case of a shortage of seed. However, already in the 1930s, at the All-Union (now All-Russian) Institute of Plant Growing, under the leadership of Academician Nikolai Vavilov, a collection of seeds for breeding began to form, which included samples collected by scientists in different countries of the world. This seed bank survived the siege of Leningrad in 1941-1944 and the death of Vavilov himself in the camp in 1943.

After the Second World War, similar projects were launched in other countries of the world. In 1979, the Scandinavian countries created a common seed bank - Nordic GeneBank. In 1984, one of the abandoned mines in Svalbard was chosen for its storage.

In 1989, consultations began between the Government of Norway, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO, FAO) and the International Council for Plant Genetic Diversity on the creation of an international repository based on GeneBank. However, at that time the project could not be implemented due to disagreements about the principles of its financing. They returned to this idea in 2004. This time, the Norwegian authorities decided to fully pay for the construction and operation of the complex.

Work on the construction of the World Seed Vault began on June 19, 2006. In January 2008, seeds from GeneBank were moved into it. The official opening took place on February 26 of the same year in the presence of Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg (now NATO Secretary General), President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso and FAO Secretary General Jacques Diouf.

Construction of a new tunnel to the storage facility is currently underway, as the original entrance, due to global warming and melting of permafrost, has begun to be flooded with groundwater.

Characteristics

The vault is located in an abandoned coal mine 120 m underground and 130 m above sea level, which guarantees it will survive a direct hit from a nuclear bomb or rising sea levels due to global warming. The storage is located in the permafrost zone (the distance to the North Pole is 1309 km), the temperature inside is naturally maintained at minus 3.5 degrees Celsius, it is artificially cooled to minus 18 degrees, which is optimal for storing seeds. In addition, there are no earthquakes on Svalbard.

Seeds are stored in sealed multilayer envelopes folded into containers.

The total area of the repository is about 1,000 square meters. A horizontal tunnel leads into it, the entrance to which is decorated with an installation by the Norwegian sculpture Dyveki Sann.

The cost of the project amounted to $9 million. In 2016, the cost of operating the repository was estimated at $240,000, the bulk of these funds were received from various international organizations, including the Global Crop Diversity Fund. In turn, among its main sponsors is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Storage

In February 2018, the number of seeds contained in the vault reached 983,000 (total capacity 4.5 million). According to the principles of the project, the largest national or supranational agricultural institutions in the world send reserve seed material to it: currently 73 organizations use its services. They own all rights to the stored material. At the same time, the Norwegian government assumes all the costs of storing the samples and transporting them to Svalbard (sending to Oslo airport is carried out at the expense of the organizers-depositors themselves).

All-Russian Institute of Plant Industry. N. I. Vavilova sent 5,278 seeds to the World Storage (as of the end of 2016). At the same time, most of the seed material (more than 100 thousand units) was received from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT, Mexico), the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI, Philippines) and the International Research Institute for the Study of Crops of Semi-arid Tropical Zones ( ICRISAT, India).

Seed owners can claim them back. The first time the envelopes from the World Repository had to be opened was in 2012 at the request of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Zones (ICARDA). Until 2012, it was based in Aleppo, but due to the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, it was decided to urgently relocate it to Beirut (Libya). At the same time, part of the seeds could not be evacuated - the shortage had to be replenished from Svalbard.

Not so long ago in Norway, in one of the godforsaken places, on the Svalbard archipelago, the world's largest granary was opened. This granary, informally called the “Doomsday” storage, is located near the small village of Longyearbyen, 1100 km from the North Pole. The vault is built in a rock at an altitude of 130 meters above sea level. The construction of the facility began in mid-2006, and already in February 2008 the repository was officially opened. The Doomsday Granary is designed to save the seeds of the most important plants from around the world from possible catastrophes, such as nuclear war, rising sea levels, or an asteroid impact. The full official name of this project is Svalbard International Seed Vault.

The Doomsday Vault was built with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, Bill Gates and a number of other global financial giants, and Norway was the initiator of the creation. The cost of the project was about 9.6 million dollars, which is not so much in today's times. At the same time, the vault, deepened 120 meters into the rock, has double doors with anti-explosion protection, two hermetic vestibules with lock chambers, motion sensors and walls of reinforced concrete 1 meter thick, which can withstand a nuclear warhead or an earthquake.

The inside of the vault is maintained at a constant temperature of -18 degrees Celsius, and the seeds are stored wrapped in aluminum foil. In the event that the refrigeration units, which can also work on local coal, fail, the temperature inside the seed rooms will not rise above -3 degrees Celsius, since the storage is located in northern latitudes, only 1000 kilometers from the North Pole. The granary is able to accommodate about 4.5 million species of seeds of terrestrial plants, and the seed reserves will be enough to completely restore one or another species that is endangered or extinct.

The designers of the Doomsday vault looked into the distant future and modeled the changes in the planet's climate 200 years into the future. They chose such a piece of land on the Svalbard archipelago, which, even if the ice sheets at the North and South Poles melt, will be above sea level. Also, this area is characterized by very low tectonic activity. The remoteness of the object from a large civilization will also contribute to safety, and permafrost will contribute to the preservation of the collected material even in the event of a failure of refrigeration equipment. Currently, the repository has already contained about 500,000 samples of plant seeds from around the world. By the time the vault is full, it will be the largest genetic seed bank in the world.

In total, according to the UN, there are about 1,400 plant seed banks in the world, the largest of which are located in the USA, China, Russia, Japan, India, South Korea, Germany and Canada (in descending order). All of them contain about 6.5 million types of seeds (of which only 1.5 million are unique). At the same time, the repository on the Svalbard archipelago is intended for the entire world community. The diversity of the Earth's flora, located in the repository, will become the property of future generations, regardless of any emergencies and weather.

official destination

Today, the conservation of plant genetic diversity is essential for the production of food for future generations of earthlings and is a significant contribution to the fight against poverty and hunger in developing countries. It is with developing countries that the origin of most of the plants is connected, and it is the developing countries that experience a rather acute need for the further development of agriculture and ensuring food security.

Built into the permafrost rock mass on the island of Svalbard (the Norwegian name for Svalbard), the Global Grain Vault aims to store duplicates of various seed varieties from seed genebanks scattered around the world. Today, many of these banks are located in developing countries. In the event that, as a result of wars, natural disasters, or simply a lack of finance, these seeds are lost, then the unique collection can be restored using the seeds stored in the global granary.

Today, the loss of biological diversity of species is one of the main threats to sustainable development and the environment. The diversity of plants used for food production is under constant pressure. Because of the loss of this diversity, there may be an irreparable loss of our ability to produce food, to grow plants that will be adapted to new plant diseases, climate change, and the needs of a growing population.

This official announcement is located on the website of the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food.

Doomsday Vault Facts

The Doomsday Vault in the Svalbard archipelago is not a genetic bank, it is a guarantee vault. Here, on behalf of various gene banks, duplicates of seeds of different varieties are stored. It will be possible to take duplicates from here only if the seeds stored in the original funds are lost for any reason. The party that deposited the seeds for storage retains ownership of them. Neither the Norwegian authorities nor the global granary on Svalbard will have the right to admit anyone to the vault's funds without the permission of the depositor. The main users of the repository will be breeders and scientists.

The granary on Svalbard is designed to store 4.5 million different types of seeds, with each type represented by a sample of 500 seeds. Thus, the maximum capacity of the granary will be 2.25 billion individual seeds. This granary will be able to accommodate all the unique types of seeds stored in genebanks around the world, as well as samples of new seeds that will be created in the future. Once filled, it will become the largest global seed fund.

Priority for storage is given to plant seeds that are used by mankind for food production and sustainable agriculture. This is of particular importance for developing countries, where ensuring food safety is an important national task. If we look at this problem in historical retrospective, we will see that more than 7,000 plant species were included in the human diet as important components of its nutrition. In modern agriculture, only 150 species are used, and only 12 plant species are the main source of plant foods used today. At the same time, there are about 100 thousand varieties of rice in the world.

In the granary, the seeds will be stored at a constant temperature of -18 degrees Celsius, packed in sealed bags and stacked in special sealed boxes. Seeds will be placed on special racks located inside the storage. Limited access to oxygen and low temperature slow down the processes of metabolism and aging of plant seeds. In turn, permafrost is a guarantee that the seeds will be able to maintain their germination even if the storage power supply system fails.

Svalbard is a unique place in many ways. Geological and climatic conditions are ideal for such an underground storage-refrigerator. The permafrost is able to ensure that the temperature inside never rises above -3 degrees Celsius. The natural sandstone of the island is characterized by a low radiation background and a stable structure. In terms of location, this granary surpasses all gene banks in the world. In addition, there is a fairly developed infrastructure, a reliable power supply system and regular flights to the mainland. For the foreseeable future, even melting permafrost will not be able to harm the vault.

The need to preserve such a large variety of seeds lies in the fact that different varieties of plants have different properties that are not always visible to the ordinary eye. First of all, we are talking about genetically determined abilities to adapt to different soil and climate, resistance to diseases, differences in nutritional properties and taste. If in the future we need to use the properties that were inherent in this or that unique plant, we will need guarantees that this plant will still be possible to find.

The shelf life of seeds depends on the particular variety. For example, pea seeds can only remain viable for 20-30 years, while, for example, seeds of some cereals and sunflowers can remain viable for many decades and even centuries. At the same time, they all gradually lose their germination capacity and die. In order to prevent this, some of the seeds will be taken from specially preserved samples and planted in the soil. So they will germinate and again give the necessary seeds, which will be placed in the place of the old ones. Following this cycle, it will be possible to store them almost forever.

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The World Seed Vault was opened in Svalbard on February 26, 2008

The world-famous crop seed repository received new donations of genetic material on Monday that have increased its collection to 1 million crops.

More than 70,000 new crops have been added to the collection, which is stored in underground cold storages located in a former Norwegian mine on the island of Svalbard.

Among the new samples are the seeds of cereals: rice, wheat and corn, a unique variety of Estonian onion potatoes, as well as barley, which is used in the manufacture of Irish beer.

On Monday, the World Seed Vault in Svalbard turned 10 years old.

One of the three storage chambers is now almost filled to the top with packets of seeds. The number of storage units reached 1 million 59 thousand 646.

What is the World Seed Vault

The World Planting Materials Seed Bank was established in 2006 under the auspices of the UN to preserve the planting material of all agricultural plants existing in the world. The project was financed by Norway and cost it $9 million.

It is also called the "Doomsday Vault", since its task is to prevent their destruction as a result of possible global catastrophes, such as the fall of an asteroid, nuclear war or global warming.

Each country received its own compartment in this bank of plants. There is enough space inside for 4.5 million seed samples.

The repository is located at a depth of 120 meters at an altitude of 130 meters above sea level in the village of Longyearbyen. The bank is equipped with blast doors and airlocks.

The safety of materials is ensured by refrigeration units capable of operating on local coal, as well as permafrost. Even if the equipment fails, it must take at least a few weeks before the temperature rises by 3°C.

Seeds are placed in sealed envelopes, which in turn are packed in plastic four-layer bags, which are placed in containers placed on metal shelves. Low temperature (−18°C) and limited oxygen supply should ensure low metabolic activity and slow seed aging.

Image copyright Ireland Department of Agriculture, Food Image caption The Irish government provided the foundation with samples of barley seed, which is used to brew traditional Irish beers.

Svalbard was chosen for the seed bank because of the permafrost and little tectonic activity in the archipelago.

The most secret places in the world

“Achieving the million mark is an important milestone,” says Hannes Dempenwolf, head of science at the Crop Trust, an international organization set up to preserve the diversity of crops used in agriculture. “Just a few years ago, we could not have imagined that once or we'll reach that mark."

genetic diversity

Since February 26, 2008, 73 organizations from various countries of the world have been participating in the work of the fund.

During this time, only one withdrawal was made from the collection.

Syrian researchers have asked for seeds of wheat, oats and some grasses intended for use in arid conditions.

Usually agronomists from all over the Middle East took samples in the seed fund of the city of Aleppo. We are talking about the International Center for Research on Dryland Agronomy, which used to supply the entire region with seeds.

In 2012, due to the civil war in Syria, its stocks were severely damaged, and the center moved to Beirut.

For an emergency replenishment of these stocks, scientists asked to return 130 boxes of seeds to them (out of 325 sent by the center for storage in Norway before the war). The management of the granary complied with the request of the researchers.

The vault was hit by flooding last year due to bad weather. However, the water did not enter the cold rooms where the samples are stored.

The chambers have since received a new layer of waterproofing and the vault as a whole is being reinforced to prepare it for the wetter and warmer weather expected in the future.

Biologists believe that there are about 2.2 million varieties of crops in the world that will eventually be harvested in Svalbard.

"The World Bank Seed Vault in Svalbard is a symbol of the tremendous day-to-day work of biodiversity conservation going on around the world," said Marie Haga, director of the Crop Trust.

"Storing such a huge variety of seeds means that scientists in the future will be able to create from them new varieties of crops with high nutritional value, resistant to extreme weather conditions, which will ensure not only the survival of future generations, but their prosperity," adds Marie Haga.

Some researchers claim that another great extinction of species has begun on our planet. According to UN studies, for the period from the 60s of the twentieth century to our time, about 28% of animals and plants have died out. Man is the main initiator of such a reduction in species diversity.

By turning the world into a scorched desert, calling this process economic growth, humanity is destroying the natural habitats of many species. Since at the current level of development of our civilization it is impossible to stop the process of destruction of the biosphere, people went the other way.

A network of genetic banks has been created in safe places on the planet, the main task of which is to preserve the entire species diversity of the Earth. Where are the so-called "doomsday vaults" located, and what are they?

Ever since man took up the plow and began to till the soil, his mind has been preoccupied with the thought of preserving the seeds of vegetable crops grown in his fields. Already 10,000 years ago, in the first settled settlements of farmers, in the center of the settlements, barns and huge pits were created, into which the harvested crops were filled for storage.

Grain, sprinkled with fragrant herbs to ward off pests and sheltered from the scorching sun, was a strategic reserve of the settlement in case of famine or siege by enemies. It was these sacred barns, on the site of which the first temples subsequently appeared, that were the first repositories of the Day of Judgment.

After many centuries, already in the 20th century, with the deterioration of the environmental situation and with the development of technology, seed storages received a different function. A network of 1,400 gene banks has been created across the planet, in which states store the seeds of most plant species growing on their territory.

This is done in case of complete extinction of any plant. Seed banks in the future will help restore to life those types of vegetation that have died under the onslaught of the sands of expanding deserts.

Gene banks will be useful to our descendants, who will have to restore the "lungs of our world" - the actively cut down Amazonian forests. Many medicinal plants growing in mountain meadows, but gradually dying out due to climate change and radioactive contamination, will in the future become part of a new biosphere that will be recreated by the next generations.

But since there are still many armed conflicts in the world, it was decided to build a single global genetic repository in which absolutely all plant species will be stored. Such a repository was opened in 2008 in Norway on the island of Svalbard, which is part of the Svalbard archipelago.

The construction of the storage facility on Svalbard was financed by both the Norwegian government and the funds of such billionaires as Rockefeller and Bill Gates. The bunker, built in just a year and a half, meets all the conditions for long-term and high-quality seed storage. The complex, carved into the rock and located in the permafrost zone, maintains a constant temperature of -18 ° C in the storage facilities.

Even if all the equipment in the gene bank fails, the seeds will not suffer. The subpolar conditions of the archipelago will not allow the temperature in storage facilities to rise above -3.5 °C. This temperature, as well as vacuum packaging of seeds and low oxygen content in storage facilities, will ensure the safety of the material for 1000 years.

Although many experts are worried about the fate of the Swaldbar storage in the event of permafrost melting, this is also not worth worrying about. The genetic bank is at a sufficient height and flooding does not threaten it.

At the moment, the seeds of three million plant species have been collected in the Swaldbar vault. Seeds for Svalbard are supplied from state seed banks and are the property of the countries that provided them. The Norwegian seed bank is, as it were, a planetary piggy bank in case of a global natural disaster or a nuclear war. By the way, the location of the bunker on the island was chosen not only because of the cool climate.

It's just that in the event of a nuclear holocaust, it is unlikely that anyone will bomb the archipelago, located on the edge of the world and on which there is nothing but a few villages and a "crowd" of polar bears. Although the Swaldbar storage facility is completely safe and does its job perfectly, there are currently two other projects to create similar facilities in the UK and Russia.

The British project for the construction of the next global seed fund involves the creation of an underground high-tech complex on the lands of West Wessex. Frankly, I do not see the point of creating a global gene bank in the British Isles.

After all, if standard gene banks do an excellent job of their functions in peacetime and help bring extinct plants back to life, then during global catastrophes, due to possible energy problems, the British mega-store will melt or become simply inaccessible. In the event of an asteroid fall, Britain may be flooded, and in the event of a world war, good old England has a high chance of becoming the epicenter of nuclear explosions.

I doubt very much that the surviving inhabitants of the islands will try to revive the biosphere of their homeland instead of simply evacuating somewhere to Siberia.

Speaking of Siberia. It was in the eastern part of this richest region, in Yakutia, that in 2012 a cryostorage similar to the Swaldbar Global Seed Fund was built. The main difference of the Russian project is that it is Russian and is intended for the storage of vegetation species that grow on the territory of the federation.

Also, the Yakut cryostorage is completely autonomous. Warehouses with seeds are charged with cold from the external environment, without the participation of any energy systems. Such a cold charging system allows maintaining the temperature at the level of 6-8 degrees of frost, which is the optimal level of cold to preserve the viability of seeds.

Independence from external power sources increases the storage facility's chances of saving seed even in the event of a complete collapse of the region's energy system. At the moment, the seed bank contains one hundred thousand species of vegetation that were transferred from the genetic banks of the Soviet era.

In the future, the leadership of the Yakut Permafrost Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, on whose territory the repository is located, plans to triple the bunker and put about a million more types of seeds into it. The location of the Russian repository in the heart of Siberia, far from the seas and mountains, at a great distance from tectonic faults, guarantees the preservation of Russia's species diversity from complete extinction or mutation.

Doomsday vaults are designed to protect the earth's biosphere from impoverishment or complete extinction. The seeds will wait their time. And it remains to be hoped that these reserves will be used by our wise descendants only to return the former wealth to the impoverished terrestrial biosphere, and not in attempts to revive the world from the ashes of an atomic fire or after a global cosmic catastrophe.