4/2/2023 0 Comments Antarctic doomsday vault![]() ![]() Although there are 1,700 gene banks scattered across the world in various countries, the seeds of crop plants stored in these gene banks are quite susceptible to war, natural catastrophes, poor financial management, and/or political instability. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is like the ultimate back up for the world’s citizens in times of a major global crisis. Currently, Norway and the Global Crop Diversity Trust is responsible for maintaining the operational costs of the vault, while governments from across the world and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide the primary sources of funding for the vault. The construction cost of $9 USD million needed for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was entirely funded by the Norwegian government. The vault was finally opened in 2008 in a partnership between the Crop Trust, NordGen, and the Norwegian Government. The founding stone of the vault was established on June 19th, 2006 by a collective group comprised of the respective Prime Ministers of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark. The vault was established by Cary Fowler, an American agriculturist and former executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, in association with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is located around 1,300 kilometers from the North Pole on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Svalbard archipelago near Longyearbyen. These seeds are highly protected so that, when needed, they can be revived again. This, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which stores spare or duplicate copies of plant seeds obtained from worldwide gene banks in its frozen interior, would be more valuable than vast reserves of platinum, gold, and diamonds in the wake of a global agricultural crisis. To save the world’s population in the aftermath of a global crisis, and to allow life on Earth to continue in the face of a major disaster, a remote location in the world houses one of the most treasured of all vaults on this planet. ![]()
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