The Evergreen Post

The entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. | Einar Jørgen Haraldseid - Wikimedia - CC BY-SA.

The global seed vault | An Arctic Noah’s ark

Norwegian history and knowledge

A global backup facility

The majestic Svalbard archipelago – part of the Kingdom of Norway – rises like a frozen oasis from the Arctic Ocean, midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole.

It is here, within the bowels of the permafrost landscape, that we find the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a botanical treasure trove.

The vault is there to protect invaluable food-plant seeds, deposited from the four corners of the world: protecting them from future natural disasters.

The vault is a central backup facility, storing duplicates of seed samples kept in national, regional, and international gene banks.

More seeds every year

The Norwegian government created the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in 2008 – and fully fund the operation.

The underground facility stretches deep into a Svalbard mountain, with three identical, separate chambers, surrounded by a thick layer of solid rock.

A few times a year, the administrators open the vault to add new batches of seeds; then catalogue and store them in sealed containers, and place them in designated locations.

As of today, the vault holds almost one million samples. The samples remain the property of the gene banks that deposit them.

Mother Nature’s own freezer

Since time immemorial, Svalbard has been a magnet for explorers and hunters. With its permafrost and challenging conditions, it is home to only the hardiest of creatures.

Electrified cooling systems keep the seed vault’s temperature at minus 18 degrees centigrade. Should the electricity fail, the permafrost will keep the seeds naturally frozen at minus 5 or 6 degrees. – That is, if latter years’ temperature increases do not radically change the weather conditions in this part of the world.

To find out more about the type of seeds stored at the Svalbard facility, visit the Svalbard Global Seed Vault web portal.

EGP.00003

Places monuments structures
Growth of the soil | Homesteading in the Norwegian mountains

Growth of the soil | Homesteading in the Norwegian mountains

,

As a young person growing up in Norway, my dream was to emigrate and become a homesteader somewhere in the North American wilderness. The problem was that I was born 100 years too late. An alternative escape was to read books and continue dreaming. One of the books I read was Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil – Markens Grøde – the novel that earned him the 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature. In the novel, we meet Isak, who creates his homestead kingdom somewhere in the Norwegian mountains. When nearly one million Norwegians emigrated in the 1800s and early 1900s – primarily to North America – their ancestors had already been homesteading across the Norwegian landscape for thousands of years. Recently, I reread Hamsun’s momentous novel, this time in English, translated by Sverre Lyngstad, who has translated several of Knut Hamsun’s books into English. The book had lost none of its glow. It remains a vital part of the journey of my life.

read more

Did you read?

Norway | A land of water

With its mountains, fjords, and forests, Norway represents one of our planet’s many majestic faces. The Kingdom of Norway, located on the western...

read more
Go to the homepage