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| Work Begins On 'Svalbard Global Seed Vault' |
374 Views |
| posted on Tuesday, June 20, 2006 |
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NORWAY TO BEGIN WORK ON ARCTIC VAULT FOR SEEDS IN CASE OF GLOBAL DISASTER
By Doug Mellgren
Associated Press
June 19, 2006
Original Link
OSLO - It sounds like something from a science-fiction film -- a doomsday vault carved into a frozen mountainside on a secluded Arctic island ready to serve as a Noah's Ark for seeds in case of a global catastrophe.
But Norway's ambitious project is on its way to becoming reality today when construction begins on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, designed to house as many as 3 million of the world's crop seeds.
Prime ministers of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland were to attend the cornerstone ceremony this morning near the town of Longyearbyen in Norway's Svalbard Islands, roughly 620 miles from the North Pole.
Terje Riis-Johansen, Norway's agriculture minister, has called the vault a "Noah's Ark on Svalbard."
Its purpose is to ensure the survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters, or climate change, and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out. The seeds, packaged in foil, would be stored at such cold temperatures that they could last hundreds, even thousands, of years, according to the independent Global Crop Diversity Trust. The trust, founded in 2004, has also worked on the project and will help run the vault, which is scheduled to open and start accepting seeds from around the world in September 2007.
Oil-rich Norway first proposed the idea a year ago, drawing wide international interest, Riis-Johansen said. The Svalbard Archipelago, 300 miles north of the mainland, was selected because it is located far from many threats and has a consistently cold climate.
Those factors will help protect the seeds and safeguard their genetic makeup, Norway's Foreign Ministry said. The vault will have thick concrete walls, and even if all cooling systems fail, the temperature in the frozen mountain will never rise above freezing due to permafrost, it said.
While the facility will be fenced in and guarded, Svalbard's free-roaming polar bears, known for their ferocity, could also act as natural guardians, according to the Global Diversity Trust.
The Nordic nation is footing the bill, amounting to about $4.8 million for infrastructure costs.
"This facility will provide a practical means to reestablish crops obliterated by major disasters," said Cary Fowler, the trust's executive secretary.
Already, about 1,400 seed banks around the world hold samples of their host country's crops. But these banks are vulnerable to shutdowns, natural disasters, war, and lack of funds, said Riis-Johansen. Storing duplicate seeds in the Svalbard vault is meant to offer a fail-safe system for the planet.
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WORK BEGINS ON GLOBAL SEED BANK ON ARCTIC ISLAND
By James Kilner
Reuters
June 20, 2006
Original Link
LONGYEARBYEN, Norway - Work began in the Arctic on Monday on building a global bank of crop seeds that scientists hope will prevent the extinction of unique species such as those lost in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The underground vault on a remote island will hold about 1.5 billion seeds and 3 million varieties in a reinforced concrete tunnel drilled 70 metres (230 feet) into a mountain, guarded by two steel doors and controlled remotely from Sweden.
"This seed bank is of global importance," Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said at the ceremony to mark the start of construction on a windswept mountain on the Svalbard archipelago overlooking fjords and glaciers.
"It's our final safety net. If seeds stored in a commercial gene bank are destroyed, and this has apparently happened about 40 times to date, the contents of this gene bank will make it possible to replace the seeds which have been lost," he said.
Lying about 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, Svalbard is a desolate, treeless archipelago where farming is impossible. Norway controls the islands and has agreed to pay the US$3 million construction bill.
The Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Trust, headed by American Cary Fowler, will manage the site when it opens next year.
The trust is a joint initiative of the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation to support crop diversity and help secure food for the world's population.
"This is a very remote location, you need that for security purposes," Fowler said. "Also Svalbard is operated by the Norwegian authorities, there is good infrastructure here, the Norwegians are volunteering to build the facility and it offers this tremendous advantage of permafrost."
The vault's temperature would be maintained at minus 18 degrees Celsius (-0.4 fahrenheit), the optimum for seed preservation, Fowler said, and if the power failed the natural permafrost would keep the temperature below freezing.
If a crop type is lost through natural disaster or war and a seed bank is destroyed, a government could request replacement seeds from the vault, Fowler said.
There were hundreds of different unknown gene types among crops that could be adapted in the future to cope with environmental changes and population pressures, he said.
Fowler told Reuters that wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda wiped out dozens of unique crops and destroyed those countries' national seed banks, which meant the genes had been lost for ever.
"You can use the word extinction in this case," he said.
This would no longer occur once the seed bank opened, he said.
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PREVIOUS NHNE NEWS LIST ARTICLE:
NORWAY TO BUILD 'DOOMSDAY VAULT' SEED BANK (1/13/2006):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nhnenews/message/10651
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