“Within a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing-cold island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole, could lie the future of humanity. The room is a ‘doomsday vault‘ designed to hold around 2 million seeds, representing all known varieties of the world’s crops. It is being built to safeguard the world’s food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of electricity supplies.”
And I’m on my way…
“The $3 million vault” – which seems a remarkably cheap price to “safeguard the world’s food supply” – “will be built deep inside a sandstone mountain lined with permafrost on the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen. The vault will have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete and will be protected behind two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors. It will not be permanently manned, but ‘the mountains are patrolled by polar bears’, says [Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international organisation promoting the project].”
“This will be the world’s most secure gene bank by some orders of magnitude,” says Fowler.
Rumors are the vault was designed by Jerry Bruckheimer – and it’s not seeds they’re keeping in there… but Noah’s Ark. Wait –
(A somewhat related, and very interesting, story: global seed-hunters, as reported in The Guardian).
What’s with the Bruckheimer addition at the bottom? You make it seem like it’s a part of the linked article. Not really credible, your blog is! Yes, I have the words toidi (idiot in lamens terms) stamped backwards on my forehead, so I will need to know in advance if you are being serious or not. Seriously. I’ve always thought this a serious blog, and it lost a little credibility in mine eyes just now.
what the? dude chill-out already. I thought the Bruckheimer comment was amusing.
I’ll try not to mention rumors in the context of future conjecture and speculation. But maybe these two posts will win back some credibility?
It’s going to be hilarious trying to get some of those seeds ‘after the apocolypse’ at a reasonable price. I’m just hoping that my own little seed bank, (gathered by hand, placed in paper envelopes, labelled with unattractive handwriting, stored in a wooden drawer in a stone house) will hold up. Cool thing is that you can’t even get a good detailed visual of Occitania on Google Maps. Guess that means we’re off the visual grid?
What I’d like to know is why it looks like that entrance has been there for ages. If it is new, what’s with all the protruding rebar and ghetto finishing?
Seems like some people know a lot more than us regular folks when it comes to the certainty of global annihilation. I’m sure some people out there know that something big is definitely going to happen within the next couple of decades.
And why is the name of the photo “1-Mosler-bank-vault,-French”?
Did someone there tell you that’s what is was made from or were you just kidding around?
Maybe it’s curtesy the World Bank / IMF who are ready for when the shit hits the fan 😉
Ciao
Just learn to eat the so-called non-native plants people have dispersed across the globe as these are particularly vigorous species and thrive on disturbance.
Nuclear war is the ultimate disturbance, no?