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The idea for the Arctic seed bank dates to the 1980s but only became a possibility after the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources came into force in 2004, the Norwegian government said. Accordingly, how many seeds are in the doomsday vault The Seed Vault has the capacity to store 4.5 million varieties of crops. "We must give ourselves every option in the future to use the whole array of plant diversity that is available to us," Smith told CNN. The Seed Vault is owned and administered by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food on behalf of the Kingdom of Norway and is established as a service to the world community. Paul Smith, the leader of the Millennium Seed Bank project, said preserving the seeds of wild plants is just as important as preserving the seeds of vital crops. The British vault, called the Millennium Seed Bank, is part of an scientific project that works with wild plants, as opposed to the seeds of crops. The vault at Svalbard is similar to an existing seed bank in Sussex, England, about an hour outside London.
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Workers used a refrigeration system to bring the vault to -18 degrees Celsius (just below 0 degrees Fahrenheit), and a smaller refrigeration system plus the area's natural permafrost and the mountain's thick rock will keep the vault at least -4 C (25 F). The vault sits at the end of a 120-meter (131-yard) tunnel blasted inside the mountain.
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Building began last year, and the vault is scheduled to open officially Tuesday. The Norwegian government paid to build the vault in a mountainside near Longyearbyen, in the remote Svalbard islands between Norway and the North Pole. LONGYEARBYEN, Norway (CNN) - A vast underground vault storing millions of seeds from around the world is scheduled to open this week in a mountain on a remote island near the Arctic Ocean.ĭubbed the "Doomsday Vault," the seed bank is considered the ultimate safety net for the world's seed collections, protecting them from a wide range of threats including war, natural disasters, lack of funding or simply poor agricultural management.