The Lair

It seems vaguely like something from a movie. Or failing which, at least a grander, larger scale version of a time capsule. Unfortunately, time capsules and archive footage usually serve to remind us of the awful hairstyles of the 80s and the cringeworthy aspects of our past. But this time, there’s pretty serious business afoot.

Way up in the arctic circle, there exists an island named Svalbard. (Yes, this Svalbard, as featured in the Pullman books). That’s the site of the “doomsday vault” (more properly, the Svabard Global Seed Vault). The wikipedia entry says that the vault was planned in 2005, I found a BBC link with some concept drawings.

The purpose of such a remote vault? No seedy business, I assure you (ok. C’mon. You had to know I was going there). The mission (via Wikipedia and also via an article in Nature)

… provide a safety net against accident loss of diversity in traditional genebanks. While the popular press has emphasized its possible utility in the event of a major regional or global catastrophe, it will certainly be more frequently accessed when genebanks lose samples due to mismanagement, accident, equipment failures, funding cuts and natural disasters. Such events occur with some regularity. In recent years, some national genebanks have also been destroyed by war and civil strife. There are some 1400 crop diversity collections around the world, but many are in politically unstable or environmentally threatened nations.

The first set of seeds from Africa arrived yesterday. Go forth and … sprout?

And while this is an awesomely laudable cause, I do have this reminder from another field. There’s no point taking backups if you don’t test restoring the backup. How do these people know that the seeds are viable? (I mean, I’m sure there is some way - like taking temperatures from the germinating seeds or something). I haven’t found out how it happens yet, though.