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Doomsday Vault Opens To Give Seeds To Syria (cnn.com)
pabloApicco sends word that the The Svalbard Global Seed Vault has opened up in order to give seeds to Syrian scientists who had to relocate their research due to the war. CNN reports: "Known as the 'Doomsday Vault,' this seed bank — operated by the Norwegian government and containing a seed of just about every known crop in the world — is meant to be humanity's backup in the event of a catastrophe that devastates crops. But it was not a natural disaster that has caused scientists to have to dip in and make the first significant withdrawal from the vault. Rather, it was the most preventable of man-made disasters -- war. The bloody conflict in Syria has left scientists at an important gene bank in Aleppo -- where new strains of drought- and heat-resistant wheat have been developed over time -- unable to continue their work in recent years. With no sign of conditions in Syria improving, scientists have begun recovering their critical inventory of seeds, sourced from around the Fertile Crescent and beyond, that have been in safekeeping beneath the Arctic ice."
And of course, seeing if the seeds they sent back out are still viable is good too. I mean, we're talking backups here. And part of a good backup is knowing that your backup is restorable and leaves things the way you expect after they are restored.
That's a big part of the research at the Millennium Seed Bank in England, which has a much wider remit (all plants!) but stores much smaller quantities of seed per species. (Svarlbard has sacks full, the MSB may have as few as 10 or 100.)
The MSB has 13% of species banked so far. Withdrawals have been made, generally to "repair" areas devastated by mining etc.
http://www.kew.org/science-con...
Nope. Not even close. See here for some people who have actually been toting up the numbers: http://www.undispatch.com/good...
Their latest figures (2012, 2013) leave out Syria because it's undoubtedly impossible to get any kind of a count there at the moment (and that's why they didn't chart them). But if we assume as many people are dying in Syria as everyplace else combined, we still get a figure one-tenth the peak in the 1970s.
Now you know. Where are you getting yours from seems to be the question.