Beneath the frozen wilderness of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, more than a thousand kilometers from the North Pole, lies a vault unlike any other: a cavern carved into bedrock and buried beneath layers of permafrost, designed to safeguard the very future of global agriculture. Since its opening in 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault—often called the “doomsday vault”—has quietly amassed duplicate samples of seed collections from nearly every country in the world, creating an almost foolproof backup of Earth’s crop diversity.
Engineered to endure war, natural disasters, climate change, and the ravages of time, the facility takes advantage of the Arctic’s naturally low temperatures and Svalbard’s geological stability. Even in the unlikely event of a prolonged power failure, the surrounding permafrost keeps stored seeds frozen, preserving their viability for decades or even centuries. Inside…
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