Disaster Planning: Norway builds a 'doomsday vault'
 
 

Norway has revealed a plan to build a "doomsday vault" hewn out of an Arctic mountain to store two million crop seeds in the event of a global disaster.

The store is designed to hold all the seeds representing the world's crops and is being built to safeguard future food supplies in the event of widespread environmental collapse.

"If the worst came to the worst, this would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet," Cary Fowler, the director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, told New Scientist magazine. The Norwegian government is planning to start work on the seed vault next year when construction engineers will drill into a sandstone mountain on the island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard archipelago, about 600 miles from the North Pole.

 

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article338009.ece

 

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