Seeds from Syria have been returned to the 'doomsday' vault that stores every known crop on the planet

Buried in the side of a mountain in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, the Global Seed Vault stores virtually every kind of seed.

And on Wednesday, that seed vault got even more seeds - almost 50,000 new samples - to help preserve biodiversity. Those returning samples include the ones sent out in 2015 to replace a collection that had been damaged by the Syrian civil war.

Cary Fowler, the man considered the "father" of the seed vault and a former executive director of the international nonprofit organization Crop Trust, compares it to a safety deposit box: the point of the vault is not for apocalyptic scenarios, but serves more as a sort of back-up drive.

Fowler told Business Insider in October that the vault is used to store duplicates of existing seed banks that have been collecting seeds for 100 years. That way, if a regional seed vault loses something, the Svalbard collection can replace the sample.

Take a look inside the vault: