The idea of a doomsday vault hidden on a remote Arctic island might sound like something from the latest James Bond movie, but the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is very much real. Located on a mountainside on Spitsbergen in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in the Arctic Sea, the vault houses spare copies of over 1.3 million seed varieties. The seeds are stored inside the vault at temperatures of around -0.4ยบ F. The permafrost and thick rock surrounding the bunker ensures that the samples will remain frozen, even if power is lost. Should disaster strike — whether it’s by war, an accident, or a natural disaster — the vault could provide survivors with access to every important crop variety in the world. The vault stores samples of seeds that represent 13,000 years of agricultural history.
