"doomsday" news and stories

Rising out of the permafrost like Superman's fortress of solitude, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault stores every kind of crop seed imaginable. The official mission of the vault is to protect biodiversity and help reduce hunger, particularly in developing nations. But as its foreboding nickname ("the doomsday vault") suggests, it could also come in handy in case of, say, apocalyptic global warming.

A fairly new project, the vault -- which is located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Svalbard archipelago -- received its first seed shipments just over two years ago, from more than 100 different nations. This month the vault hits a new milestone: The collection now tops 500,000, making it the most diverse seed collection on earth. There's a ways to go before it's full, though. The vault has the capacity to hold 4.5 million samples, and each sample itself holds 500 seeds, so a maximum of 2.25 billion seeds can be protected and preserved.

The Norwegians are building a "doomsday vault" for seeds. Buried deep inside a mountain, deep in the Arctic Circle, scientists say that the seeds will be preserved indefinately at temperatures well below freezing. And, to prevent theft, as well as for safety's sake, "the mountains are patrolled by polar bears," though humans will most likely monitor the facility.

The seed depository is being created to preserve the various species of plants that currently exist on the planet, many of which will disappear with each passing year as selective breeding reduces diversity in favor of commercially popular crops. In theory, these seeds can be used to resurrect species of plants that may disappear in the future. Intriguing as this idea is, one must wonder if there would be a demand for such reconstructed species, or whether they would only be regrown for scientific curiosity. Would it be easier to simply alter existing strains of apples - through selective breeding or gene modification - than to rebuild it from a seed or two? And if it were necessary to rebuild agriculture from the approximately 2 million seeds in the vault as the result of something wiping out global plant life, it seems likely that most of humanity would be wiped out as well. Maybe the Norwegians would still be able to get there, though.