Doomsday' seed bank Growing strongly

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A reader's contribution

Doomsday' seed bank Growing strongly

Arctic vault now contains the world's most diverse repository of crop seeds,
operators
say

Ian MacDougall
Mar. 10, 2010 7:01PM EST

Oslo, Norway - The Associated Press - Two years after receiving its first
deposits, a "doomsday" seed vault on an Arctic island has amassed half a
million seed samples, making it the world's most diverse repository of crop
seeds, the vault's operators announced Thursday.

Cary Fowler, who heads the trust that oversees the seed collection, which is
620 miles (1,000 kilometers) from the North Pole, said the facility now
houses at least one-third of the world's crop seeds.

"In my lifetime, I don't think we'll go over 1.5 million. I'd be rather
surprised if we go over a million," Fowler told The Associated Press. "At
that point, we'd have all the diversity in the world ... and the most secure
samples."

Located in Norway's remote Svalbard archipelago, the Svalbard Global Seed
Vault is
a safeguard against wars or natural disasters wiping out food crops around
the globe.
It was opened in 2008 as a master backup to the world's other 1,400 seed
banks, in
case their deposits are lost.

War wiped out seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and another bank in the
Philippines
was flooded in the wake of a typhoon in 2006. The Svalbard bank is designed
to withstand
global warming, earthquakes and even nuclear strikes.

Despite the rapid progress, Fowler said the bank still has significant holes
in its collection.
"There are a few unique collections that we don't have up there yet -
Ethiopia and some of the Indian materials and some of the Chinese
materials," he said.

The most recent additions include a mold-resistant bean from Colombia and a
collection
of nearly every agricultural soybean species developed in the U.S. in the
last century.

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