The Svalbard Global Seed Vault Opens in the Arctic

On 26 February 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault officially opened inside a sandstone mountain on the remote Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. With its seed storage area more than 100 meters inside the mountain and situated well above sea level, the Arctic installation was established to provide long-term, secure duplication for crop diversity maintained in gene banks across the globe. The initial concept built on regional practices dating back to 1984, when the Nordic Gene Bank began freezing backup seeds within an abandoned coal mine near Longyearbyen. The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, adopted in 2001, entered into force in 2004 and provided the legal framework for a single international security facility.

After Norway was encouraged by the agricultural research organization now known as Bioversity International to consider a global facility, a 2004 feasibility study by a group that included conservationist Cary Fowler concluded that Svalbard was a suitable location. In October 2004, Norway committed to fund and establish the vault. In June 2006, the prime ministers of the five Nordic countries, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland, announced its establishment in a small ceremony on Svalbard. The resulting structure was engineered to utilize surrounding permafrost as natural refrigeration, complemented by an artificial cooling system, supplied with electricity from the public power plant in Longyearbyen, that keeps the seed store at a constant minus 18 degrees Celsius.