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The Arctic vault that saves the world's seeds

There's a bank in the Arctic that only accepts seeds.

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The real story

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in 2008, dug deep into a mountain on an island off northern Norway. It holds backup copies of seeds from gene banks all over the world, kept at minus 18°C. If the power ever failed, the permafrost around it would keep the seeds frozen.

For years nothing came out. Then in 2015 the first withdrawal was made by a research centre that had been forced out of Aleppo by the war in Syria. It used its backup seeds to rebuild its collection of wheat, barley and lentils somewhere new.

What the narrator says

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The facts we checked

  • The vault (Svalbard, Norway) opened in 2008 and is kept at −18 °C
  • It holds over a million seed samples
  • The first withdrawal was in 2015, when researchers who had fled Aleppo, Syria, took back their seeds to regrow them
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