‘The “doomsday” vault is designed to keep millions of seed samples safe from natural and unnatural disasters: global warming, asteroid strikes, plant diseases, nuclear warfare, and even earthquakes,’ National Geographic reported in 2008. Everyone from Fox News to Wired magazine has used the unofficial nickname ‘doomsday seed vault’ to refer to the project, and it is routinely described as a last haven and refuge for plant biodiversity should some global catastrophe destroy the world’s crops. Since its inception, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has repeatedly evoked a sense of the apocalypse. My friend Alia turned to me after a few minutes and said, ‘It’s breathing.’ We stood around a bit longer, taking photographs, discussing what to do next, until the noise returned - about 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, regular and steady. After about 30 seconds, both air and water ceased. A small but steady burst of water came trickling out the bottom of the vault, draining into the ravine below the bridge. Then came the massive whoosh of air from the seed vault, a sudden and powerful exhaust, venting through the building from somewhere deep inside the mountain. You quickly get used to the frigid silence that surrounds you. Even in summer, when tourist season is at its height, it’s far from bustling here. We exhaled visible vapour, while taking in the stillness of Longyearbyen, the main settlement on the island. Unsure exactly what to do, I milled around outside with a few other visitors. Below this decorative façade, however, is a less welcoming sight: an industrial, slate-coloured door, chained and padlocked.
#Doomsday vault gets massive upgrade series#
It consists of a series of irregular blue-silver shards, suggesting fractured and disappearing ice. Above the vault, Dyveke Sanne’s art installation runs the length of the roof, then spills over the top down the front, ending just above the door. Below the entrance is a tiny ravine, and a small bridge one has to cross to reach the vault. You take a switchback road up a hill to get to the vault, where it juts from the side of a slope a few hundred feet above sea level, looking like a grim, grey tunnel extending out of rock, snow and lichen. There are more than 1,000 crop diversity collections worldwide, but the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard was built away from civilisation because it is the fail-safe, the insurance policy, the last resort.
Built 900km north of Europe in Svalbard, a barren archipelago in Norway, it sits on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, containing duplicate specimens from other seed vaults scattered throughout the world. A series of tunnels bored into the side of a mountain, this vault is climate-controlled, secure against tectonic activity or sea-level rise, and designed to hold up to 4.5 million different seed varieties for centuries to come. Since 2007, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has maintained a repository of the world’s agricultural heritage.
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