Inside the Arctic Seed Vault Designed to Save Humanity From Extinction
Written by
Motherboard
November 11, 2016 // 11:11 AM EST
In the Arctic Circle, on the far-northern Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, a drab facility carved into the mountainside could be humanity's last hope in the event of a global catastrophe. This is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a roughly 400-foot-long building designed to store seed samples for 4.5 million different varieties of crops from around the world, or 2.5 billion individual seeds. The vault even contains seeds from North Korea.
Among the crops stored in the cavernous underground ice tunnels at -18º C (-0.4º F): 150,000 samples of rice, and 140,000 samples of wheat. Now you can take a look inside as Motherboard tours this awe-inspiring facility.
The goal is to create a kind of genetic vault of human agriculture, or a "Noah's Ark" of genetic diversity, as the Global Seed Vault has been called.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/inside-the-arctic-seed-vault-designed-to-save-humanity
