Doomsday...
what percentage of seeds will need to adapt when climate change reaches 1.5c of change?
What is 60%
Seeds are kept sub this temperature
What is 0°C
The seeds are placed at this temperature to reduce the amount of aging that occurs when waiting inside the vault.
How long is the current seed vault likely to last?
What is 100 years.
Built in 2008, it has the possibility to go longer, but they run the risk of loosing some of the permafrost that keeps the vault cool.
The seed vault is located on this archipelagos
What is Svalbard
The location for this vault is in the cool regions of the arctic, where war, drought, and other weather conditions can't affect the seeds that are stored within.
The only time that seeds have ever been taken out of the seed vault was a result of this war in 2011.
What is the Syrian War
One of the largest seed vaults in the world was located in Syria when it was destroyed, so seeds were used from the reserve in the seed vault to help repopulate the agriculture in the area once the war had ended.
There are have been this many depositors to the Global Seed Vault
What is 102
The reason for this is because of the secure nature of the vault. Being located far from any largely populated area, the ability for it to be attacked is minimal, which is why so many countries put their faith in this one over the ones within their own country.
There are over 150 000 different types of wheat inside the seed vault, but how many are commonly found in todays agriculture?
What are 6
Variety in crops has gone down in almost every single agriculture sector
When depositing seeds, a depositor does not need to pay for the deposit but has to pay for 2 other things.
What is packaging and shipping
The depositor (person who is depositing seeds into the vault) does not pay for storing the seed in the vault (storing is free) but shipping it to Svalbard and packaging the seed costs the depositor money. It is free because it is a global gene bank.
There are over this many types of seed varieties in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
What is 1.2 million
The reason for this is that we don't know what the future holds for us, so different varieties work under different weather conditions, and plants that work in today's climate may not work in the ones changed by the climate.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is built to withstand this level of sea level rise.
What is a 3-metre sea level rise?
This is because the 130 m building is located in a area where there is not a risk of sea level rising (due to the high latitude and cold climate)
Seeds before being shipped to the Vault, must go through one big process
What is duplicating the seed
Before the seed is submitted into the vault, the seed must be duplicated in another Gene Bank to be accepted into the Gene bank (and a sample of the seed must stay in another Gene Bank)
The original Svalbard Seed Vault was located in this abandoned place.
What is a Mine
The original idea for the vault was inside of an abandoned mine in 1984. The reason was because of the permafrost that encompassed the inside of the Mine was right for proper seed storage conditions.