Work Begins on Arctic Seed Vault

Aryabhata writes "BBC reports that Norway is starting construction on a 'doomsday vault' in the Arctic which is designed to house all known varieties of the world's crops. The vault's purpose is to ensure 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. 'More than 100 countries have backed the vault, which will store seeds, packaged in foil, at sub-zero temperatures. ... Norway's Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen has called the vault a "Noah's Ark on Svalbard."'"

Comments

those exist....

[zogger]

..many people now maintain their own long term "sealed in a can" seed storage, myself included. I always keep quite a bit of various garden seed packed away, a lot of them are in number #10 enameled cans just for this exact purpose like in the article.

    Google for "heirloom seens, long term storage", you can find companies that sell seeds packed into cans for long shelf life. You can do it yourself too, it's not that hard to make sealed containers with like CO2 flooded in there, etc. It's a common technique in the survival/preparedness communities.

Re:those exist....

[Magada]

Medieval (and earlier) people used covered-up holes in the ground (usually clay) to store their cereal. Many of these were found to have charred sides (but not bottom, which was covered in largish rocks) and bits of partly-burnt hay were found on occasion. An archeological mistery, but perhaps what these people did was to "pad" the walls of their pit with smallish amounts of hay, fill it, set the hay on fire and finally cover the lot to extinguish the fire. It is my educated guess that the hay would burn quicky and go out quickly, before being able to make a significant amount of "popcorn". Low-tech CO2-flooded seed storage, anybody?

Ah. Where's an experimental archeologist when you need one?

Re:All the worlds eggs in one basket

[sumdumass]

catastrophy? just wait until some rebels take control of the vault and then wipe all the other crop seeds out with some bioterrorism. Then everyone will have to pay them to replant or starve.

Redundancy might be a must.,

Re:The Moon

[halcyon1234]

I'd much rather see some sort of fail-safe built into this vault. Humans have to periodically check in on the vault and press the button. If they don't press it after, say, 1,000 years, the vault goes into "reseed" mode. It assumes that:

a) Humans are dead, dying, or incapable of reaching the vault

b) Whatever knocked down the humans has dissapated over the last 1000 years, so it is safe for "human friendly" life.

Of course, the 1000 years is arbitrary. I'd let a team of nuke'n'germ warfare folks come up with a number that was greater than the life expectency of thier most powerful kabooms. You could also hook up a Geiger counter to the release switch for an extra layer of protection.

So, after the 1000 years is up, the vault springs into action. It barfs out whatever bacteria is needed to fertilize the land. The it starts shooting seeds-and-spores-and-stuff deployment packages across the globe. The SSS packages burst over land, raining seeds. This may have to be done in stages. Seed the keystone species of plants first, then once those have grown, fire off the strawberries and lilacs.

The objective is to load up the vault with enough human-friendly stuff as possible. Plants that put out oxygen. Trees that have leaves, fruit, roots that are edible by human. Environmental engineer species. If humans are alive, life will get better for them. If humans have been wiped out, the packages should recreate an environment condusive to human life once more. Sure, humans might not be a dominant species for hundreds or hundreds of thousands of years, but the scales would be tipped in their favour.

Heck, while we're at it, we might as well put as much data into the vault as possible. The complete history of humans in as many languages as possible (including all the screw-ups that lead to extinction). Put in as many Rosetta Stones as possible. Put frozen humans in there, too, so future generations (hopefully) don't think aliens seeded the planet.