Doomsday seed vault unsealed because of Syria war

The request for the seeds is exactly the kind of hard event that the vault was established to help with, those behind it said.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is buried almost 400 feet into the side of a mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.

One such collection, held in Aleppo, has been partially destroyed by Syria’s ongoing civil war.

The more than 4000 plant species kept here provide a “global backstop” for the world’s biodiversity in the face of climate change and other dramatic transformations on the planet.

A vault carved into the Arctic permafrost is filled with samples of the world’s most important seeds in case food crops are wiped out by a catastrophe. Svalbard has been nicknamed “the Doomsday Vault” because it’s supposed to be the backup to the backup. Now it says they’re ready to have them back for planting. But they left behind an important collection of drought-resistant seeds in cold storage. Run by the Global Crop Diversity Trust the vault, a huge cement structure which sticks out of the ice, is designed so that even if the power was switched off the frozen and sealed seed inside would be safe for at least two centuries. “There’s seeds sitting on the same shelf from North Korea and South Korea, and they get along just fine up there”.

The authorities of Svalbard, the archipelago, on which the Global Seed Vault is located, has unsealed its stock of seeds for the first time in history.

Around 500 seeds of each variety are contained within the vault, according to Lainoff, and the different varieties are key to genetic resistance against potential disease that could affect the world’s major crops. It is the first such request since the facility opened in 2008.

Researchers from ICARDA had to move their headquarters from Aleppo in Syria to Beirut in Lebanon in 2012 as a result of the Syrian conflict.

The unceasing Syrian civil war has killed hundreds of thousands of people, displaced millions, and accelerated the rise of ISIS. The organization managed to duplicate 80 percent of its collection in Svalbard as of March this year, where the seeds were safely stored along with others from around the world.