1 Million Unique Crops in 'Doomsday Vault'
February 26, 2018 Make it 1 million seeds in Norway's safeguard against the apocalypse. The Global Seed Vault, in Svalbard, has been running for 10 years now, squirreling away stashes of the world's crops to be able to provide in case of dire emergency; to celebrate, vault officials have announced that they have 1,059,646 packets of seeds, after receiving a delivery of more than 70,000 packets, including unique varieties of black-eyed peas, corn, rice, and wheat. Also among the delivery were seeds of the Bambara groundnut, a drought-tolerant legume grown in sub-Saharan Africa. For storage, the vault has three chambers, one of which is almost full of packets of seeds. Vault officials stressed again that they were accommodating a wide variety of crops, from all over the world. New waterproof walls have been designed to avoid a repeat of the flooding that occurred in 2017. Extreme weather resulted in flooding in the vault's entranceway, but the floodwaters did not seep into the ground far enough to damage the seed chambers, which are deep underground. |
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