![]() The researchers have relocated to the cities of Lebanon and Morocco, where the seeds that had been stored in the Arctic ice are now growing again. Due to the war in Syria, researchers from the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas were forced to abandon their research center in the city of Aleppo for fear of it being bombed, leaving behind their 135,000 varieties of crop plants. The reason for the extraction wasn’t flooding or droughts or earthquakes, but rather an entirely man-made disaster: war. Even more recently, an ancient date palm was grown from a 2,000-year-old seed found beneath the rubble of the ancient fortress of Masada, in Israel. ![]() A sacred lotus was grown from a seed over a thousand years old, for example, after being excavated from a dried lake bed in China. There are scientific accounts of seeds germinating after lying dormant for thousands of years in less than perfect conditions. What’s even more incredible is that seeds can even remain viable for that long, but amazingly they can. The seeds in the Svalbard vault are kept at -18☌, and the facility has the capacity to store up to 2.5 billion seeds for a thousand years. In order to store dormant seeds over long periods of time, they need to be frozen at subzero temperatures. It’s also cold … very cold, and the permafrost around the vault never melts, which means the seeds are protected from the effects of climate change (at least for now), even if the power in the building fails, and the secluded location, far removed from political unrest, protects the vault from the destruction of war. The vault itself is located deep beneath a mountain, making it safe even from small asteroid impacts. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was built with the premise of centralizing the world’s supply of crop seeds in a place where they’d be safe from virtually any threat. But there are several problems with the Genebanks we currently have, one of the biggest being that some of the most important ones are located in politically unstable regions, such as Colombia, Ethiopia, and Syria. It may, therefore, be pivotal for the survival of our species to preserve as much diversity as we can. With increased human development and the threat of rapid global warming, species all around the world are already going extinct at an alarming rate. ![]() Organizations and countries all around the world have been doing it for years according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, there are currently around 1,700 Genebanks in different parts of the globe that store seeds from crops in case they go extinct. ![]() The idea of safeguarding the world’s supply of crop diversity is by no means a new one. Its construction was funded by the country of Norway with the sole purpose of preserving the seeds of various crops from around the world. This is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, or the “Doomsday Vault,” as it’s come to be known by some. ![]() If you were to approach this building at night, you might be somewhat startled by the appearance of what looked to be a luminescent crystal protruding from the side of a frozen mountain, it’s refracted light entwined with the sinuating colors of the aurora borealis overhead. Svalbard is home to the world’s northernmost city, Longyearbyen, and while otherwise unremarkable, the island has recently taken to the world stage due to a facility built back in 2008. During the winter, the sun hangs low in the southern sky before finally dipping beneath the horizon, leaving the island in a perennial twilight for several months. The furthest distance you can travel north on a scheduled flight is the island of Svalbard, located in a small archipelago above the Arctic Circle and part of the country of Norway. ![]()
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