Credit: M. TEFRE/GLOBAL CROP DIVERSITY TRUST
The glittering entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault leads into a 100-metre tunnel dug in the side of a cave at Longyearbyen, a remote Arctic archipelago in Norway. Its first batch of seeds was accepted on 26 February — the initial stage in a plan to provide a repository holding back-up copies of seeds representing almost every food crop in existence.
At its launch, Jacques Diouf, head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, described the project as “one of the most significant acts in the preservation of humanity”.
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Hopkin, M. Snapshot: 'Doomsday vault' opens. Nature 451, 1037 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/4511037b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/4511037b
