It’s supposed to hold seeds from every known crop on the planet, but now it’s getting an upgrade because, well, the world as we know it is slowly dying.

Situated on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago – about 1 300 kilometres from the North Pole – the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was officially opened in 2008, and cost around $9 million (R106 million).

The purpose of the vault is to secure our future, just in case something goes severely wrong (climate change, nuclear war etc) and the world is unable to grow seed for whatever crops, reports Business Insider.

Norway’s government has now announced that they have planned an overhaul, which will involve spending a further $12 million ($142 million) to seriously beef up the vault:

On Monday, more than 76,000 seed samples were added to the storage space, which is opened for new deposits a few times a year. New specimens were brought in from seed banks in Australia, Kenya, the US, Costa Rica, and other places around the globe.

Reasons for the vault’s upgrade vary, but one of the scariest is that the vault has already been dipped into:

In 2015, Syria’s ICARDA seed bank withdrew samples from the vault — a first — so it could restore its collection after sustaining damage during war. It’s fortunate that Svalbard had the seeds that were needed. ICARDA returned the samples to the vault in 2017.

Then, last year, the vault hit some trouble. The five doors are only opened for deposits, when the seeds are carried to a long chamber kept at -18 degrees Celsius.

It’s supposed to stay frozen for 200 years, even if the power goes out, but:

[I]n May of 2017, melting permafrost caused caused a glacier-like flow of water to freeze inside the tunnel. Though permafrost is by definition supposed to stay frozen, it didn’t.

Luckily, the water didn’t reach the main chamber and workers were able to remove the ice. But the new upgrades would provide additional backups.

Nice.

The proposed project “includes the construction of a new, concrete-built access tunnel, as well as a service building to house emergency power and refrigerating units and other electrical equipment that emits heat through the tunnel,” according to a statement by the Norwegian government.

Hopefully that’s enough to keep everything inside safe and secure in case we ever need it.

Imagine the uproar if the world ran out of avo?

[source:businessinsider]