A vault carved into the Arctic permafrost and filled with samples of the world's most important seeds was inaugurated on Tuesday, providing a Noah's Ark of food crops in the event of a global catastrophe.
"This is a frozen garden of Eden," said European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso at the opening ceremony.
Aimed at safeguarding biodiversity in the face of climate change, wars and other natural and man-made disasters, the new seed bank has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million batches, or twice the number of crop varieties believed to exist in the world.
Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg inaugurated the vault by depositing a box of rice grains in one of its chambers.
"The world is a bit safer today," Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and project mastermind, said.
Norway has assumed the entire US$8.9 million charge for building the so-called "doomsday vault" in its Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, just some 1,000km from the North Pole.
Decorated for the occasion with a life-size ice sculpture of a polar bear, the vault, which overlooks a fjord, forms a long trident-shaped tunnel bored deep into the sandstone and limestone.
Only the entrance juts out of the snow-covered mountainside, illuminated with artwork made up of mirrors and metal that create a colorful prism.
Duplicates of seed samples from 21 seed banks around the world are already in the vault. Contributions from the more than 1,300 other seed banks worldwide are expected at a later date.
The "doomsday vault" has been built 130m above current sea level, putting it high enough to escape flooding if global warming causes the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to melt entirely. The vault has also been built to withstand nuclear missile attacks.
"We hope and work for the best, but we have to plan for the worst," Barroso said.
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