Saturday, May 20, 2017

The Global Seed Vault

Did you know about it? It's a storage facility, deep inside a mountain in the Arctic, designed to preserve the world's crops from future disasters. It stores seeds from 5,000 crop species from around the world. Dried and frozen, it is believed they can be preserved for hundreds of years. If a nation's seeds are lost as a result of a natural disaster or a man-made catastrophe, the specimens stored in the Arctic could be used to regenerate them. It is run by Norway.

Global warming has affected the vault.  Last year  unseasonably high temperatures caused the permafrost to melt, sending water into the access tunnel. No seeds were damaged but the facility is to have new waterproof walls in the tunnel and drainage ditches outside. 

No comments: