If a really scary thing ever happens to the entire biosphere, we'll be ready. Sort of. This week in Norway, the Norwegian government opens a vault everyone's calling the "doomsday" seed vault. They built their underground bunker way up in the really cold part of Norway, in the Svalbard islands. These islands must have been the inspiration for that polar bear kingdom in "The Golden Compass", though there are, unfortunately, no armored, talking bears guarding the vault - just regular, non-verbal polar bears, who are plenty scary on their own, thank you. The vault holds millions of seeds underground, packed in foil, at subzero temperatures, which means they could be dormant for hundreds or thousands of years without dying. It was constructed so that these seeds would be protected in the case of disaster (nuclear? asteroid hitting the planet? the Singularity? we've got the straight dope on end-of-the-world scenarios, here). More prosaically, however, the vault could also prove useful in the case of agricultural foul-ups that might render some seeds extinct in their original forms. Wednesday, February 27, 2008
The ultimate time capsule: all the seeds in the world
If a really scary thing ever happens to the entire biosphere, we'll be ready. Sort of. This week in Norway, the Norwegian government opens a vault everyone's calling the "doomsday" seed vault. They built their underground bunker way up in the really cold part of Norway, in the Svalbard islands. These islands must have been the inspiration for that polar bear kingdom in "The Golden Compass", though there are, unfortunately, no armored, talking bears guarding the vault - just regular, non-verbal polar bears, who are plenty scary on their own, thank you. The vault holds millions of seeds underground, packed in foil, at subzero temperatures, which means they could be dormant for hundreds or thousands of years without dying. It was constructed so that these seeds would be protected in the case of disaster (nuclear? asteroid hitting the planet? the Singularity? we've got the straight dope on end-of-the-world scenarios, here). More prosaically, however, the vault could also prove useful in the case of agricultural foul-ups that might render some seeds extinct in their original forms. 
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