ABSTRACT
In the remote archipelago of Svalbard in Norway, only 810 miles short of the North Pole, in a cavern dug 390 feet inside a sandstone mountain, stands a terrestrial, frigid Noah’s Ark for plants. It houses ‘spare copies’ of seeds held in gene banks worldwide, thus serving as the ultimate refuge for biodiversity. The seeds are packed in multi-ply foil bags that are sealed in ‘black boxes’ whose contents are known only to the scientists who deposited them there. By design, everything is going for it in terms of long-term conservation – the icy bedrock that keeps the collection in permafrost, the ideal elevation that protects it from tectonic activity, and the impressive governmental and multilateral funding that the futuristic set-up attracts
