📍Svalbard: The Gene Bank near the North Pole

One of the most precious structures located in the Arctic is the Svalbard Gene Bank built into a mountain on Spitsbergen Island, just outside the town of Longyearbyen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago of Norway. This international Gene Bank is located roughly 120 meters deep inside the frozen permafrost, at a latitude of 78 degrees North, well inside the Arctic Circle, close to the North Pole.

The Gene Bank in Svalbard is often referred to as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault or the Doomsday Vault. This name embodies the intent of the Gene/ Seed collection in Svalbard, that if the Earth were to suffer catastrophic damage, if doomsday, so to speak, were to arrive, then seeds of the crops grown across the world would be found stored safely here. These seeds could be used to replant the ravaged Earth and help the remnants of the surviving humanity to stay alive and re-people the Earth again.

Svalbard is to be seen as a secure backup facility for seeds. It is like a safe deposit box where the seeds remain the property of the depositors. The bank holds over 1.4 million samples from countries across the globe. The vault physically holds backup seed samples from over 220 countries /territories which means practically the whole world. It preserves the genetic diversity of crop plants, especially food crops against climate change, wars, disasters, and other catastrophes that the human race could dream up.

India is among the leading contributors to the Svalbard Bank. The largest number of samples have come from the National Gene Banks of India, the United States, Germany, and Canada. These countries maintain some of the biggest volumes of backup crates inside the vault. 

I visited the Svalbard Seed Vault in 2009 at the invitation of the Norwegian Government. The invitation came because of Gene Campaign’s work on conserving crop genetic diversity and setting up community managed Zero Energy Gene–Seed Banks in villages in Jharkhand. Different kind of banks to the Arctic vault but same goals.