Norway to House Seeds in Doomsday Vault
"Norway's ambitious project is on its way to becoming reality Monday 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 on Monday morning near the town of Longyearbyen in Norway's remote Svalbard Islands, roughly 620 miles from the North Pole.
Norway's Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen 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."
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4 comments:
That's good stuff, I hope that this shelter could survive a global nuclear war, epidemic, etc though.
dev,
How was the wedding, or did you not make it. K
Hey man, good to be back. I'm not sure if I could keep the pope out of trouble though.. it's been a solid month of buffoonery.
I made the wedding (only 45 minutes late.. prolly shouldn't have played that last round of beer pong). Drank scotch and dirty birds while the Italian Stallion did the macarena(sp).
well you didn't miss much, after that last round of beer pong cashwell was pretty much on his last leg for the afternoon. boz got to much sun and the damn dogs keep getting out. But over all it was a nice weekend, I will be down sometime soon to partake is the buffoonery
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