I can’t believe this is real. There is a seed bank in the Arctic where 500,000 samples of everything on Earth is stored. You know, in case we blow everything up with a nuclear bomb and the only people who survive can fly around the earth on hover-pods replanting our lost flora after the radioactivity dies down.

They even call it a Doomsday vault in Reuters. It is the most diverse collection of food seeds in history. And I can’t stop thinking about new questions I have.

Just who is going to get into this vault? And how? What would they possibly be able to do with all of these seeds if it came to some kind of doomsday scenario where they were the only person or people on the planet. Would you really be spending your day planting conifers and orchids? I don’t know- maybe you would? Maybe things would suddenly be a whole lot easier. No people, no jobs beyond staying alive, and your whole role is to repopulate the earth…

The vault itself is only 2 years old and located on an archipelago off of Norway. It’s under the permafrost. Not nuclear war nor power failure can harm this vault. It’s indestructible, so to speak.

So, are there Monsanto seeds in there or natural ones?

 The Global Crop Diversity Trust runs the vault with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center in Sweden. Amazing. I still can’t get over the fact that it exists at all, let alone that it is government funded… ok, that part I believe… but I still want an explanation as to how this is supposed to help or be deployed in the event that there is some kind of massive disaster- like, HOW IS ANYONE GOING TO KNOW IT’S THERE? HOW IS ANYONE GOING TO GET IN?

The $10 million facility opened in 2008 with 268,000 varieties of seeds from more than 100 countries.

 In all, Reuters says that three vault rooms will eventually be able to hold 4.5 million samples- which could mean up to 2 billion seeds (multiple seeds per sample).

Check this sentence: “Blasted out of icy rock 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the air-locked vaults would stay frozen for 200 years even in the worst-case scenario of global warming and if mechanical refrigeration were to fail, designers say.”

Straight out of Reuters. That sounds like an infomercial.

The folks who run this thing think it could be a valuable resource in creating new seeds that are more resistant to global warming changes.

So we’ve got all of these seeds buried up in the Arctic- it still strikes me as something James Bond would be saving in a movie or the kind of place that they are actually training Chuck Norris Ninja Dudes or something.

All of the research and storage could be done anywhere- the doomsday stuff, ok, I get it.

But who’s going to be able to get in??? And what’s going to grow???

Can you believe this was one of Time Magazines Top Ten inventions of 2008?

Photo Credit: pictoscribe (via Flickr under CCL)