Neither earthquakes nor floods are threats.

Temperatures are below zero, and humidity is almost non-existent. It is situated atop a frozen mountain in the Himalayas, on a treacherous road that traverses elevations as high as 5,360 meters (17,688 feet). Three hours from the nearest town, Leh, Chang La is difficult to reach. “These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine,” Fowler declares. That’s why the SGSV is needed and why Norway paid the $9 million in construction costs, Bill Gates paid the costs of shipping the 1.5 billion seeds, and almost every nation has contributed seeds. The downside is the family variety goes extinct.”Īny number of catastrophes, natural, technological, or otherwise, including “equipment failure or mismanagement,” can destroy a crop, Fowler says, and “once that crop is lost,” it is gone forever, and, with it, its resistance to disease or pests would disappear forever as well. But today, farmers are planting mass-produced industrial seeds. Seeds used to be passed down through families. Scientist Cary Fowler offers an example: of the 7,100 varieties of apples that existed in the 19th century, only 300 remain “the extinction rate for apple varieties in the United States is about 86 percent.” There’s a reason that “extinction exists in all crops.

The SGSV is also a hedge against extinction, which isn’t something that may happen in the future, but is happening now. The treasure the vault holds is too precious to risk: seeds, collected from all over the world, over a period of seventy years-1.5 billion of them, enough to reseed agriculture, should a Doomsday event occur. The vault is so cold that it will remain frozen for a quarter of a century, even if power to the refrigeration that maintains temperatures below those of the permafrost that covers the vault should fail. the sun never rises, and the moon never sets.”Ī huge, wedge-shaped entrance leads into the side of a mountain and into the Doomsday vault, which is built to last 10,000 years. The residents of Longyearbyen, the closest settlement, number just over two thousand. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), administered by Norway, is located on icy islands, known as Svalbard, or the “cold coast.” As might be expected, this region of the world is sparsely populated. Whatever befalls us on Doomsday, survivors will have food to eat, cultural artifacts to treasure, sweet treats to enjoy, and maybe even pets to pamper.ġ0 Highly Guarded Vaults 10 Svalbard Global Seed Vault We have built vast storage vaults in the arctic and elsewhere, and scientists hope to build yet another one, underground, on the moon. Culture, beneficial bacteria, and cookies should survive, too. We’re ready, though, or as ready as we can be, at least where food supplies are concerned. Any number of catastrophic events could bring Doomsday upon us. A stray meteor on a collision course with Earth. Her work will be featured in a solo exhibit at the Encuentros Abiertos Photography Biennial in Buenos Aires in August.Global or nuclear war. Doherty says she is interested in the vault from a philosophical and cultural standpoint and is “captivated by the photographic process of collecting and making visible the inaccessible or invisible.” She also plans to photograph Argentina’s seed bank. The Svalbard vault did not have X-ray machines for her use, but she plans to use her documentary-style photos in a future book. She then incorporates the images into digital collages. For the project, Doherty has used X-ray machines to photograph seeds and cloned plants at the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Colorado and the Millennium Seed Bank in England. The fellowship has allowed her to continue work on her project, Archiving Eden, inspired by an article she read about the Svalbard vault’s opening in 2008. Doherty took photos of the vault as part of her faculty fellowship with UNT’s Institute for the Advancement of the Arts. When photography professor Dornith Doherty journeyed to a remote Norwegian island this spring, just 800 miles from the North Pole, she became one of a select few to see inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.īuilt into a frozen mountainside and opened only a few times a year, the vault secures the world’s seed collections from natural disaster or catastrophe.

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