Wednesday, March 07, 2007

For after the end of the world

Norway is building a Doomsday bunker that has every known crop seed in the world:

While some of us are stocking up on duct tape, gas masks and enough bottled water to last through the initial weeks of the end of the world, the government of Norway has partnered up with the Global Crop Diversity Trust to prepare for the event that doomsday leaves some survivors. The Svalbard International Seed Vault, dubbed the "doomsday vault," will house samples of every variety of crop seed available in every country in the world. The vault's purpose is safeguard agricultural biodiversity in the event that nuclear war, climate change, a meteor hit or another Earth-shattering event destroys all current plant life in the world or in a particular region.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust has named several other uses for the vault, including replacing seeds lost in damage to any of the 1,400 seed vaults around the world, safeguarding seeds for developing countries and spreading general knowledge of the threat to crop diversity (the United Nations puts the percentage of genetic diversity already lost to ecological damage at 75 percent). But other uses aside, the design of the vault screams "the end is near." This is definitely a structure built with doomsday in mind. Its main purpose is to provide diverse crop life in the event that life as we know it disappears.

[snip]
To protect the global treasure, the tunnel features several reinforced doors before you get to the vaults, and the entrance will be under 24-hour video surveillance. The architects have purposely designed the structure to require no human maintenance at all, for obvious and chilling reasons. The entrance will not be hidden. On the contrary, it will be easy to spot and artistic, equipped with special panels that will reflect light from both sun and the moon quite dramatically. The idea is that the vault should call attention to itself, just in case everyone who currently knows about the vault is unable to share their knowledge of what lies deep inside one of the mountains of the Svalbard islands.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks Ellroon - I forgot about this. The Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa wrote a bit on it in the last couple of years. I think they have some sort of relationship with it.

What is even cooler (ha!) about it is that they are trying to preserve biodiversity by getting seeds for each crop from its point of origin, too, so that in theory some future humans can restart our garden as if nothing happened.

Regards,

Tengrain

ellroon said...

Oh great. Kinda a reset button after we kill off everybody. Can we just pretend we've had the Great Wars and start over now?