If you believe the media hype, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is preparation for doomsday.
Inside here -- and no, I'm not allowed in, like the rest of this tour group -- inside
here, on the edge of the world, is a giant freezer that keeps plant seeds, storing them
frozen at minus 18 celsius, safe from any disaster. The vault is earthquake-resistant,
it's high up a mountain in case of sea level rise, and deep in that mountain, 150 metres,
in case of asteroid strike. And, in theory, even in a cold-war nuclear apocalypse there'd
be a lot of missiles flying overhead, over the North Pole, but no-one's actually going
to bother getting one to land on this arctic wasteland.
It's a good story, isn't it? The doomsday vault, ready to kickstart the earth after
most of humanity's wiped out. But it is just a good story.
In reality, the Seed Vault is an offsite backup. Many countries in the world have their own
version of it, for their own local seeds: The US has one in Colorado, and Britain has
one in West Sussex. If a plant goes extinct, hopefully it can be recovered from there;
but as anyone who's ever accidentally deleted a file knows, you should always have multiple
backups. And that's what this is. When a country's seed bank is flooded, or goes up in flames,
or gets destroyed through incompetence or malice: the Svalbard vault will be there to
help them restock.
In the event of an apocalypse, we're going to have a lot of things to do that are much
more important than trekking to the Arctic Circle to recover some obscure seeds.
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