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Norway building 'doomsday vault' to preserve seeds

An Arctic "doomsday vault" aimed at providing mankind with food in case of a global catastrophe will be designed to sustain the effects of climate change, the project's builders said yesterday as they unveiled the architectural plans.

The top-security repository, carved into the permafrost of a mountain in Norway's remote Svalbard archipelago near the North Pole, will preserve some three million batches of seeds from all known varieties of the planet's crops.

The hope is that the vault will make it possible to re-establish crops that are obliterated by major disasters.

"We have taken into consideration the temperature rising and have located the facility so far inside the rock that it will be in permafrost and won't be affected" by the outside temperature, said Magnus Bredeli Tveiten, project manager at Norway's Directorate of Public Construction and Property.

Construction on the seed bank will begin next month.

Seed samples

The seed samples, such as those for wheat and potatoes, will be stored in two chambers located deep inside a mountain. The chambers will be accessed by a 120m tunnel.

The tunnel and vaults will be excavated by boring and blasting and the rock walls sprayed with concrete.

The seeds will be maintained at a temperature of minus 18oC.

The vault is situated about 130m above the current sea level.

It would not flood if Greenland's ice sheet melts, which some estimate would increase sea levels by 7m.

It is also expected to be safe if Antarctica's ice completely melts, which experts say could increase sea levels by 61m.

The entry to the vault, which will extend straight out of the mountainside, will be a narrow triangular portal made of cement and steel. The entrance will be illuminated with artwork that changes according to the Arctic light.

`Large diamond'

In summer, "in the midnight sun, it will look like a large diamond," Tveiten said.

In winter, when the sun does not rise above the horizon, "it will glow into the darkness," he said.

Behind the airlock door, each chamber will measure 375m3. Corrugated plastic boxes the size of moving boxes will sit on rows of metal shelves.

Each box will contain about 400 samples in envelopes made of polyethelene and each sample will contain around 500 seeds.

The samples will be stored in watertight foil packages to act as a barrier against moisture should a power failure disable refrigeration systems.

Construction on the US$3 million vault is due to be finished in September. It will officially open in late winter next year.

The design of the structure is "simple, it's functional, it runs by itself. We can't have a better design," said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the brains behind the vault.

"It makes use of the natural cold. It's planned with the climate change factor taken into consideration and it will be frozen 200 years from now. And even in the worst-case scenario, if the temperature rises it will still be safe," he said.
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