INTERNATIONAL SEED BUNKER LAUNCHED IN NORWAY
February 1st, 2008
BY MONICA DOBIE
A FREEZING cave in the Arctic town of Longyearbyen on the Norwegian island of Svalbard has been converted into a high-tech bunker containing millions of seed samples, collected and stored to preserve biodiversity.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault will house 4.5 million samples of the 7,000 plant species used in human diets throughout history, including important crops such as wheat, barley and beans. They are to be stored safely at minus 18C in this remote location for centuries.
The vault at the end of a 130-metre tunnel blasted into a frozen ...
Full access to this article can be arranged with permission from the client that first ordered it. Please contact us to request access. Entries are uploaded to our archive at least one year after being published by a client – free access is restricted to International News Services journalists for background research only. The article date indicates when copy was filed to a client, not when posted to this archive. Upon client requests, International News Services will remove such articles from the archive or not upload them in the first place. They are included to demonstrate the breadth of topics undertaken by the agency and also to help promote clients’ coverage.