The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is designed to safeguard more than 2 billion seeds in case of natural or manmade disaster.
Located on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean near the village of Longyearbyen, the vault is built into permafrost deep inside a mountain. It opened Tuesday, with 75 boxes of seeds.
Norway owns the facility — nicknamed the "Doomsday Vault" — and the Global Crop Diversity Trust is funding the seed collection.
Cary Fowler, the group's executive director, says the world is losing a significant amount of diversity "on a daily basis."
"When a crop variety becomes extinct, we lose the ability to use any unique trait that it might have in the future. So if it turns out that one of those crop varieties held the key to resistance to a particular insect pest or disease, or was really heat tolerant and could be used in the future to help us adapt to climate change, then it's sort of tough luck," Fowler tells Melissa Block.
The three storage rooms inside the vault are sealed behind air-tight doors and kept at a temperature below zero. Each one can hold about 1.5 million small packages of seeds.
The seeds that are viable for the shortest amount of time — lettuce, for example — can stay healthy for about 50 years, Fowler says.
But at the other extreme, experimental results suggest that other seeds — such as sorghum — could be safely stored in these conditions for nearly 20,000 years.
Monitoring of the seed vault will take place electronically — and no one will work at the site physically on a day-to-day basis.
Fowler says the seed vault's annual operating cost will be about $150,000.
"We think that's about the cheapest insurance policy anybody can imagine for the world's most valuable natural resource," he says.
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