![]() Please bookmark and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here. Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. The vault was built at Svalbard because the Arctic’s cold climate means its contents will stay cool even if the power fails. The seeds were grown and re-deposited at the Svalbard vault in 2017. In 2015, researchers made a first withdrawal from the vault after Syria’s civil war damaged a seed bank near the city of Aleppo. With Tuesday’s deposit, it will contain one million different kinds of seeds, from almost all nations. Costco's doomsday-prepper food kits will get you through the first year of the apocalypse.Don't panic, humanity's 'doomsday' seed vault is probably still safe. ![]() “We need to preserve this biodiversity, this crop diversity, to provide healthy diets and nutritious foods, and for providing farmers, especially smallholders, with sustainable livelihoods so that they can adapt to new conditions.”Īlready, one-in-nine people go to bed hungry globally, according to the United Nations’ World Food Programme, and scientists have predicted that erratic weather patterns could reduce both the quality and the quantity of food available. On a rugged island north of Norway, sits a building that houses the most important collection of seeds in the world, stored away in the event of catastrophe. Officially known as the World Arctic Archive, the vault opened this week and has already taken submissions from. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Just in time for doomsday, Norway’s Doomsday Vault is getting an expansion. “The seed vault is the backup in the global system of conservation to secure food security on Earth,” Stefan Schmitz, executive director of the Crop Trust, the Bonn-based organization which manages the vault, told Reuters. Photo by ERNESTO BENAVIDES/AFP/Getty Images Seeds of these tubercules were sent to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SISV) in Norway. An employee of the Potato International Centre (CIP) in Lima, handles seeds of potatoes and sweet potatoes being cultivated at the Centre. In October, Norway completed an $11 million, year-long upgrade of the whole facility. They also installed pumps inside the seed vault in case of a flood. Afterwards, vault managers undertook major work to waterproof the entrance tunnel, including digging trenches into the mountainside to divert future meltwater away. According to The Guardian, the Norwegian government, which owns the vault, didn’t expect the water breach. The world used to cultivate around 7,000 different plants but experts say we now get about 60 per cent of our calories from three main crops - maize, wheat and rice - making food supplies vulnerable if climate change causes harvests to fail.īut even the doomsday vault itself has been affected by climate change an unexpected thaw of permafrost when the vault first opened let water into the 100-metre-long tunnel entrance of the building, although no seeds were damaged. ![]() He said the seed vault was the ultimate insurance policy for the world's food supply.The vault also serves as a backup for plant breeders to develop new varieties of crops. "We need to preserve this biodiversity, this crop diversity, to provide healthy diets and nutritious foods, and for providing farmers, especially smallholders, with sustainable livelihoods so that they can adapt to new conditions." ![]() "The seed vault is the backup in the global system of conservation to secure food security on Earth," said Stefan Schmitz, the executive director of the Crop Trust, the Bonn-based organisation that manages the vault. Erratic weather patterns a threat to food availability The world used to cultivate around 7,000 different plants but experts say we now get about 60 per cent of our calories from three main crops - maize, wheat and rice - making food supplies vulnerable if climate change causes harvests to fail. The vault also serves as a backup for plant breeders to develop new varieties of crops. The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in Britain banked seeds harvested from the meadows of Prince Charles' private residence, Highgrove.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |