New Scientist reports that Norway is building a doomsday vault within a freezing-cold island
just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole. It will hold around 2 million seeds,
representing all known varieties of the world's crops. The
vault's seed collection duplicates seeds already held at
other seed banks -- most are no longer widely
planted, but they contain genetic traits regularly
used in plant breeding. It is being
built to safeguard the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate
change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing
collapse of electricity supplies. "If the worst came to the worst, this
would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet," says
Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an
independent international organisation promoting the project.
From issue 2534 of New Scientist magazine, 12 January 2006, page 12
