Norway Plans to Keep Seeds On Ice
Norway has announced plans to build a “Noah’s Ark” for seeds, according to this AP story. The vault, in the remote Svalbard Islands, could keep three million seeds safe in the event of a disaster, which the designers define as nuclear war, environmental collapse, or “accidents, mismanagement and shortsighted budget cuts.”
The seeds will be wrapped in foil packets and kept at temperatures well below freezing so that they can exist indefinitely. Even if the project’s funding dries up, the natural climate of the location (just 620 miles from the North Pole) will keep the facility below freezing.
The group suggests that polar bears could act as natural defences, though current thinking suggests that the arctic carnivores are a lost cause at this point: Global warming has put the species on the chopping block.
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