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Doomsday Vault Under Construction

June 19, 2006 9:36AM

Three feet of reinforced concrete will fortify the seed repository of last resort, with Arctic permafrost keeping samples frozen for 100 years, even if electricity fails, officials said.

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It sounds like a 1950s science fiction movie plot, but five Nordic nations say they are building a "doomsday seed vault" in an Arctic mountain.
The vault, being built near Svalbard, Norway, on a Barents Sea island, is designed to ensure the long-term survival of the Earth's food crops should a major catastrophe befall the planet, Global Crop Diversity Trust said in a release.

Three feet of reinforced concrete will fortify the seed repository of last resort, with Arctic permafrost keeping samples frozen for 100 years, even if electricity fails, officials said.

The samples -- stored in watertight foil packages -- will be protected by massive security doors, guards, motion detectors and even the ubiquitous presence of polar bears.

The $3 million vault will have a capacity of 3 million seed samples -- replicates of the world's most critical crop collections, now scattered among some 1,400 gene banks on every continent except Antarctica.

Samples will remain viable for hundreds of years -- some varieties for thousands of years -- and will only be released in the event all other seed sources have been destroyed or exhausted.

Construction began Monday with a ceremony attended by the prime ministers of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.




© 2006 United Press International. All rights reserved.
© 2006 Sci-Tech Today. All rights reserved.