The man behind the 'doomsday' vault that stores every known crop on the planet explains how it came to be
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Oct 13, 2016, 04:47 IST
The vault is located in Svalbard, an archipelago that's part of Norway. It's a cold area filled with polar bears and snow scooters, along with brightly colored houses.
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The archipelago is located in the Arctic Ocean, midway between the North Pole and Norway, where the warmest temperature this year was 58 degrees Fahrenheit. The winters remain below 0 and -1 degrees Fahrenheit.
The entrance to the vault sticks out of a mountain, illuminated with a light installation by Dyveke Sanne. Fowler told Business Insider that at first, he had no intention to write a book about the vault. In the end, he decided he needed to document how the seed vault came to be, including photos from the construction, striking photos of the Svalbard landscape, and initial design sketches.
Photographers including Mari Tefre and Jim Richardson, whose photographs are featured in the book, have been documenting the seed bank along the way.
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Inside the entrance, there's a tunnel that runs from the entrance to the vault's rooms, 426 feet deep into the mountain.
Fowler said he also wanted to clear up some misunderstandings about what the vault's used for. "People will say, 'how can you have enough seeds up there?' That's not the point, it's not for planting. This is really a genetic resource for plant breeding."
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Svalbard was an ideal location because it's so cold, the seeds can stay frozen in the permafrost. Importantly, says Fowler, "the seeds don't have to be used as is." Instead, researchers can use them to study potentially beneficial traits, like those for withstanding disease or climate change, and hopefully one day incorporate those into current crops.
Every year, gene-banks provide samples to crop breeders to test out, which in turn becomes different varieties of crops. Below, people taste tomatoes at a Seed Savers Exchange in the US.
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"We don't need to experience apocalypse in order for the Seed Vault to be useful and to repay its costs many times over," Fowler wrote in his book. "We ... were not anticipating the end of the world. ... We were pragmatists. We wanted to address a problem we were already experiencing: the loss of diversity in individual gene-banks."
And it's already proved its helpfulness — the seed bank was able to replace some of the samples that had been lost after a seed bank in Aleppo was damaged during the Syrian War. "It illustrates why we built it," Fowler said. "Loss of that collection would be irreplaceable. ... I tell people it's a great story — a sad story — of the seed vault functioning as an insurance policy."
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