![]() The entrance leads to a small tunnel-like room filled with the loud whirring noise of electricity and cooling systems required to keep the temperature within the vault consistent. Its only neighbor is a similar repository buried away from the dangers of the world: the Arctic World Archive, which aims to preserve data for the world’s governments and private institutions, opened deep in a nearby mine on March 27. It is situated in a safe place,” says Bente Naeverdal, a property manager who oversees the day-to-day operation of the vault. “It is away from the places on earth where you have war and terror, everything maybe you are afraid of in other places. It was precisely for its remoteness that Svalbard was chosen as the location of the vault. Near the entrance to the facility, a rectangular wedge of concrete that juts out starkly against the snowy landscape, the doomsday nickname seems eerily apt. This past winter offered the gene bank a chance to redress the balance. Genetic material is being lost all over the globe,” says Marie Haga, executive director of the Crop Trust. “There are big and small doomsdays going on around the world every day. On this occasion, samples from India, Pakistan and Mexico were being deposited alongside seeds from Syria, many of whose citizens are living through their own apocalypse. But it is the much smaller, localized destruction and threats facing gene banks all over the world that the vault was designed to protect against-and it’s why the vault was opened in February, when TIME visited. The Global Seed Vault has been dubbed the “doomsday” vault, which conjures up an image of a reserve of seeds for use in case of an apocalyptic event or a global catastrophe. It is the farthest north you can fly on a commercial airline, and apart from the nearby town of Longyearbyen, it is a vast white expanse of frozen emptiness. Let’s take a look at the seeds they’re stockpiling, the polar bears that totally DO guard the place and the mysterious Black Box system they’ve put in place.It would be difficult to find a place more remote than the icy wilderness of Svalbard. Somewhere in the chilly snows of Svalbard stands the Doomsday Vault. To safeguarding us from any future disasters, natural or of our own darn making. I do worry that my as-yet-unconceived children will inherit a world where they can’t even breathe on the surface without special apparatus.Īs bleak a picture as I’m painting here, though, here’s something else important to bear in mind: some of us are working towards ensuring our futures. I do get a little worried about the future at times. That’s one of the main factors that gives us our impetus to travel, really: seeing some of the world’s most incredible sights and attractions before we ruthlessly sell them, flatten them and build a McDonald’s and a couple of apartment blocks in their place. Heck, you can hardly hop onto social media anymore without seeing something that makes you fear for the future of humanity and our planet. It’s easy to get totally down about that sort of thing. I passed a newsstand on my way to the store just this morning, and saw about six different headlines that made me want to just crawl under the blankets and never come out. Pollution, deforestation, people generally doing super unfortunate things to each other. We often hear that things have gone all the way to heckola, in the bad old world of 2018.
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