'Doomsday vault' will get new seeds next year

摘要

Two batches of crop seeds will be added to more than 860,000 samples already placed within a "doomsday vault" constructed in an Arctic mountainside. The vault, located on the Svalbard archipelago between Norway and the North Pole, was opened in 2008 and designed to protect crop seeds in a global catastrophe, including nuclear war or disease. "The seed vault is the backup of the backup," said Cierra Martin, a spokeswoman for the Crop Trust, the Bonn, Germany-based organization that manages the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The vault was opened for the first time in September because of the conflict in Syria. Officials withdrew seeds to help the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) re-establish its collections after it moved to Beirut from Syria.