The recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq saw their national collections looted and destroyed in the Philippines, a tornado ripped through a wall, flooding the country’s store in Cameroon and Italy, power outages and equipment failure meant the loss of hundreds of specimens. It has been a bleak time for the world’s 1,400 seedbanks. We built this for the apocalypse that’s happening every day, in seedbanks around the world, where unique varieties are lost and become extinct.” “That’s not why we built this facility, though we understood that a facility like this would probably be useful in those situations. “But this is not about nuclear war, or an asteroid hitting the Earth,” Fowler clarifies. Fowler has referred to the vault as the “Noah’s Ark” or “Fort Knox of seeds”. It is concave at one end to ensure that the blast of a direct hit would be bounced back along it rather than into the rooms where the seeds are stored. The tunnel, with its four locked doors, movement sensors and coded keys, is modelled on those used in military facilities. Cary Fowler, the executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which runs the vault, tells me that the structure was created to withstand “bunker buster” and nuclear bombs. The vault extends 146m into the sandstone mountain at the end, there are three airlocked refrigerated caverns with space to preserve up to 4.5 million strains of plants. They could even be called on to restart global agriculture in the aftermath of an apocalypse. Built in 2008 by the Norwegian government (for $9 million), it houses 526,000 samples of seeds scientists hope these might be interbred in order to adapt global agriculture to climate change, thereby averting mass starvation. It was designed to be a beacon, a symbol of hope looking out over the Barents Sea. A brutalist wedge of concrete slicing into the cliff, the building shimmers in the harsh, arctic light as if it were glazed in diamonds. As the plane comes in to land at Longyearbyen airport – the furthest north you can reach by scheduled flight – you can see the Svalbard Global Seed Vault cut into the barren mountainside above the runway.
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