Eventually it will send new samples back to Norway. OSLO (Reuters) - A vault in the Arctic built to preserve seeds for rice, wheat and other food staples contains one million varieties with the addition on Tuesday of specimens grown by Cherokee. In a newly released virtual tour, people from around the world can now take a look inside the enormous seed depository built into a. ICARDA has requested approximately 16,500 of its seed samples - one seventh of the total it has stored in Svalbard - and hopes to reproduce them at its other facilities in Morocco and the American University in Beirut, Lebanon. A Norwegian doomsday vault would allow them to do just that. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a doomsday shelter for the food supply, is tucked into a remote mountain on Spitsbergen, in Norways Svalbard archipelago. By Jesse Ferreras Global News Posted 11:08 pm. “We are of course very sad and frustrated at the situation in Aleppo but at the same time it shows that having a backup facility is important and it works.” Snow blows off the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the remote Norwegian archipelago. ‘Doomsday’ vault, built to withstand disaster, breached by water due to climate change. “Ideally, all the world’s seed gene banks would function normally but of course we are prepared for this. Photograph: John Mcconnico/AP Climate crisis This article is. The Ministry of Agriculture and Food handles the administration. The Svalbard ‘doomsday’ seed vault was built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters. “We hoped that we would never get such a request,” said Asmund Asdal, who runs the vault on behalf of the Nordic Genetic Resources Center. The Norwegian government owns the vault, which is built of angular concrete. Built into the mountainside on the Svalbard archipelago, it relies on permafrost and thick rock to ensure that the seed samples will remain frozen even without power. It will be the first time seeds have been withdrawn from the facility, which lies more than 800 miles inside Arctic Circle - midway between Norway and the North Pole - and is the largest vault of its kind in the world. The vault was created by the Norwegian government in 2008 to protect vital crops such as wheat against global disasters, war or disease. The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) said it has made a request to take back some of its samples from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
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