Doomsday Seed Vault Celebrates First Birthday

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a facility constructed on a mountain deep in the Arctic permafrost as a doomsday-proof backup for gene banks around the world, celebrates its one-year anniversary. To mark the event, four tons of seeds- almost 90,000 samples of hundreds of crop species-from gene banks maintained in countries such as Canada, Ireland, Syria, Mexico, Colombia and USA were delivered to the repository.

Cary Fowler, Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which operates the seed vault said: "The vault was opened last year to ensure that one day all of humanity's existing food crop varieties would be safely protected from any threat to agricultural production, natural or man made. It's amazing how far we have come toward accomplishing that goal." The vault has already amassed a collection of more than 400,000 unique seed samples in its first year. The Global Crop Diversity Trust maintains the repository in collaboration with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center in Sweden.

For more information on the Doomsday Seed Vault, visit http://www.croptrust.org/main/