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"Doomsday" Seed Vault Inaugurated

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    Posted: February 26 2008 at 12:33pm
   
Biodiversity 'doomsday vault' comes to life in Arctic

Graphic on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, designed to preserve crop diversity in case of large-scale catastrophe, in advance of its inauguration on February 26.

Aimed at providing mankind with a Noah's Ark of food in the event of a global catastrophe, an Arctic "doomsday vault" filled with samples of the world's most important seeds will be inaugurated here Tuesday.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and Nobel Peace Prize winning environmentalist Wangari Matai will be among the personalities present at the inauguration of the vault, which has been carved into the permafrost of a remote Arctic mountain, just some 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) from the North Pole.

The vault, made up of three spacious cold chambers each measuring 27 x 10 metres (89 x 33 feet), create a long trident-shaped tunnel bored into the sandstone and limestone.

It has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds from all known varieties of the planet's main food crops, making it possible to re-establish plants if they disappear from their natural environment or are obliterated by major disasters.

"The facility is built to hold twice as many varieties of agricultural crops as we think exist," explained Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and project mastermind.

"It will not be filled up in my lifetime, nor in my grandchildren's lifetime," he predicted in a phone interview with AFP.

Norway has assumed the six million euro (8.9 million dollar) charge for building the vault in its Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, where ironically no crops grow.

Secured behind an airlock door, the three airtight chambers have the capacity to house duplicates of samples from all the world's more than 1,400 existing seed banks.

Many of the more vulnerable seed banks have begun contributing to the "doomsday vault" collection, but some of the world's biodiversity has already disappeared, with gene vaults in both Iraq and Afghanistan destroyed by war and a seed bank in the Philippines annihilated by a typhoon.

By the time of the inauguration on Tuesday, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault should hold some 250,000 samples, which will remain the property of their countries of origin.

Pakistan and Kenya, both undergoing periods of serious unrest, have sent seed collections, while samples sent from Colombia have been closely scrutinised by police to avoid the project becoming a vehicle for drug trafficking.

"I've been working in this field for 30 years and I thought I knew at least all the crops," Fowler said.

After receiving a list of all the different seeds in the vault, however, "I must admit there are a number of crops I've never heard of before," he said.

That's a spectacular amount of diversity for Svalbard, where no trees can grow due to the permafrost and where the mercury plummets to an average 14 degrees Celsius below zero (6.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in winter.

The Norwegian archipelago, which is home to some 2,300 people, was selected not despite but because of its inhospitable climate, as well as its remote location far from civil strife.

The seeds of wheat, maize, oats and other crops will be stored at a constant temperature of minus 18 degrees Celsius, and even if the freezer system fails the permafrost will ensure that temperatures never rise above 3.5 degrees Celsius below freezing.

"Svalbard really met all the criteria," Fowler said.

Protected by high walls of fortified concrete, an armoured door, a sensor alarm and the native polar bears that roam the region, the "doomsday vault" has been built 130 metres (425 feet) above current sea level -- high enough that it would not flood if the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt entirely due to global warming.

The concrete cocoon has also been built to withstand nuclear missile attacks or a plunging plane, something that could come in handy in light of the 6.4-scale tremor -- the biggest earthquake in Norway's history -- registered near the archipelago on Thursday.

© 2008 AFP
This news is brought to you by PhysOrg.com


   
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Evergreen Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 26 2008 at 12:38pm
Hungary to start the world's first wild seed bank
By: All Hungary News
2008-02-25 08:24:00

The world's first gene bank for wild plants is to be established in Hungary, reports geographic.hu, the online version of National Geographic magazine's Hungarian edition. The collection would be stored at the Institute of Agrobotany in Tápiószele, Pest County, and store the genes of 85,000 types of cultivated plants, making it Europe's fifth largest agrobotany gene bank.

terra.hu
Colchicum hungaricum (Magyar kikerics), one of Hungary's protected plant species that lives only on the highest hill in the Villány Hills, the Szársomlyó, in Baranya County.
A tender for the proposed wild plant gene bank in Hungary was submitted by the Hungarian ministry of environment to the European Union in December 2007. The tender outlined a five-year program to establish a gene bank for wild plants living in the Carpathian Basin, known as the Pannon biogeographic region. The project will initiate when the tender passes.



The first step of the project will be to research other countries' seed banks, said Katalin Rodics, an associate of the ministry. In Spain, for example, a project was launched nearly 50 years ago and conserved drought-tolerant plants in gene banks. One question that the process raises, however, is how to best conserve plants that prefer moist environments.



After research, Hungarian experts will collect plants, prioritizing the most endangered endemic species and then seeds that are already being stored. The cost of establishing the collection, to be called Pannon Magbank (Pannon Seed Bank), is estimated at Ft 400 million (roughly 1.5 million). Half of the cost will be covered by the EU and the other half by the ministry. The tender will be evaluated again in August 2008.


Conserving the biodiversity of the Pannon biogeographic region is extremely important, in part to prepare for unforeseeable effects of climate change. "It is important to connect ex-situ [off-site] conservation of cultivated and wild plants, as not only several of our wild plant species are endangered, but there is also a drastic decrease of diversity happening among our cultivated plants," Rodics said.



While the project is not the "doomsday" Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the Hungarian seed bank is innovative in its own right. Not many other countries has launched their own programs to conserve wild plant species, despite the 1992 ruling at the Convention on Biological Diversity requesting participating countries do so. The international treaty was designed to sustain the diversity of life on Earth and mandated that countries should establish gene banks to conserve at least 60% of endangered wild plant species.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Penham Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 26 2008 at 5:29pm

There was a news story tonight on the national news (ABC) about the seed bank, showed camera footage, quite interesting. I never even knew about this before I read your story and saw the news tonight.

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 26 2008 at 7:41pm
Well we may all be dead but the seeds will be preserved. I hope the next "intellegent" being that inhabits the earth can use the seeds. All kidding aside, I think this is a wonderful idea --let's all hope we never need to use it.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 26 2008 at 9:37pm
Originally posted by FluMom FluMom wrote:

Well we may all be dead but the seeds will be preserved. I hope the next "intellegent" being that inhabits the earth can use the seeds. .


but didnt the intellagent life create the means of self destruction, like Einstein and the atom bomb..
intellagents is nothing but a tool its how one uses it and self control thats important.


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