Global General
Norway doomsday seed vault hits 1/2 million mark
(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-03-13 03:02
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OSLO, Norway – Two years after receiving its first deposits, a "doomsday" seed vault on an Arctic island has amassed half a million seed samples, making it the world's most diverse repository of crop seeds, the vault's operators announced Thursday.
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 The interior of Vault 2 inside the Global Seed Vault in Longyearbyen, 2008. Barely two years after it opened, a unique Arctic "doomsday" stockpile of all the world's crop seeds has reached the half-million species mark. [Agencies] |
Cary Fowler — who heads the trust that oversees the seed collection, which is 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) from the North Pole, said the facility now houses at least one-third of the world's crop seeds.
"In my lifetime, I don't think we'll go over 1.5 million. I'd be rather surprised if we go over a million," Fowler told The Associated Press. "At that point, we'd have all the diversity in the world ... and the most secure samples."
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War wiped out seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and another bank in the Philippines was flooded in the wake of a typhoon in 2006. The Svalbard bank is designed to withstand global warming, earthquakes and even nuclear strikes.
Despite the rapid progress, Fowler said the bank still has significant holes in its collection.
"There are a few unique collections that we don't have up there yet — Ethiopia and some of the Indian materials and some of the Chinese materials," he said.
The most recent additions include a mold-resistant bean from Colombia and a collection of nearly every agricultural soybean species developed in the US in the last century.
