On arrival at the vault, the seeds were plunged to a temperature of -18C, frozen in time against drought, pestilence, war, disease, and the slow-moving disaster of climate change.įor plant scientists and farmers to breed the traits that can resist higher temperatures and long-term droughts, they need access to genetic diversity. The late Kenyan environmental activist and Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai made the first deposit, a box of rice seeds, in February 2008. Governments from Washington to Pyongyang agreed to deposit back-up copies of their most precious plant resources in Svalbard. When governments began to talk about the danger to crops from climate change, Norway emerged as one of the only places still trusted by both developing and industrialised countries: if there was to be an agreement on founding a safe house for seeds, Norway was the logical place. At a time when industrial-scale farming was perceived as a threat to crop diversity, it was the first experiment in using the permafrost as cold storage for seeds. But in the early 1980s, Nordic countries began using an abandoned mine shaft, down the hill from the vault, as a safe house for seeds. Nothing grows there apart from wildflowers and grass. There exist no signs that it was settled by humans before whalers and hunters built small communities along the coast, and coal was found. The site was built to be disaster-proof: 130 metres up the mountain in case of sea-level rise, earthquake resistant, and with a natural insulation of permafrost to ensure the contents were kept frozen for decades to come.Ībout 60% of Svalbard is glacial. That morning, it contained the seeds of nearly 4,000 plant species – more than 720,000 individual plastic-sheathed samples. Since 2008, the Svalbard seed vault and its guardians have been entrusted by the world’s governments with the safekeeping of the most prized varieties of crops on which human civilisation was raised. In the most important property under his care – the Svalbard Global Seed Vault – the temperature reading was off. It is a stunning view, but that day, the monitor commanded Bjerke’s attention. Statsbygg’s green industrial-style building sits on a hill overlooking the town and the inky blue waters of a fjord. But when Bjerke arrived at the office, he was looking forward to spending Christmas with his wife and three children near Oslo. Bjerke loved the stillness, and getting out into that big white Arctic wasteland on his snowmobile so much so that he signed on for a second posting at Svalbard a decade or more after his first stint. For Bjerke, who works for the Norwegian government’s property agency, Statsbygg, the cold and isolation were the big attraction when he moved there. The main town, Longyearbyen, has many unexpected comforts – tax-free liquor and cigarettes, clothing stores and a cafe with artisan chocolates shaped like polar bears and snowflakes. The archipelago, which lies in the Arctic ocean, is under Norway’s control, but it is nearly twice as far from Oslo as it is from the North Pole.
The morning of 16 December 2014 was relatively mild for winter in Svalbard: -7.6C with moderate winds. 🌍 Follow the link to watch the conference "Global Crisis.O ne Tuesday last winter, in the town nearest to the North Pole, Robert Bjerke turned up for work at his regular hour and looked at the computer monitor on his desk to discover, or so it seemed for a few horrible moments, that the future of human civilisation was in jeopardy. We Want to Live" in 100 languages of simultaneous translation:
📢 Watch the International Online Forum "Global Crisis. You can join in spreading information about the possibility of building a Creative Society to bring it to everyone and thus save lives. ❗️ Dear friend! Your participation in saving the planet is more important now than ever. But we have a real chance of survival – the unification of all mankind and building a Creative Society. Yes, we are now in the midst of mounting climate shocks. And everyone seems to understand that catastrophe is inevitable, but pretend it’s all gonna be okay. And it is impossible to find a safe place for it on the whole Earth since no one knows where the next cataclysm will occur. What absurdity is going on in our heads?Įven more absurd is the fact that the Doomsday Vault is already in danger because of climate change. It is as if we are purposefully moving towards the destruction of our civilization. Why is humanity preparing for a global catastrophe? Our society has created the Doomsday Vault, the Doomsday Clock. While it was built to protect the largest seed collection from a global catastrophe (Armageddon).
Now it has become clear that it literally stands on active volcanoes. 🆘 Doomsday seed vault is located in Svalbard (Norway) on the North pole.
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