Norway will invest 10 million euros to protect its "Vault of the Day of Judgment"
Norway will invest 10 million euros to protect its "Vault of the Day of Judgment"
The government of Norway is still preparing to protect humanity from the apocalypse, and has decided to update its "Vault of the Day of Judgment". Called really 'Svalbard Global Seed Vault', it was built ten years ago in an abandoned coal mine in the Arctic to store and protect the seeds of crops and plants around the world.
As announced, 100 million Norwegian crowns will be invested (10 million euros in exchange) in different maintenance works and improvements to the facilities. One of the main ones will be the construction of a new access tunnel to the plant made of concrete, but it will not be the only one either.
A new service building will also be created, in which refrigeration and emergency power units will be stored with which to face any setback that endangers the power supply of the complex. In addition, other electrical equipment that emits heat through the access tunnel will be installed.
"The updates we hope to start now will ensure that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault can continue to provide the world's gene banks with secure storage space in the future," said Jon Georg Dale, Norwegian Minister of Agriculture and Food. . "It is a great and important task to safeguard all the genetic material that is crucial for world food security."
A backup pair do not starve
With the geopolitical and technological uncertainty of recent years, there are those who are preparing for a potential apocalypse. Among them is the Norwegian government with this project, which aims to safeguard crops around the world against any type of catastrophe, whether natural or caused by humans.
For example, in the event that a nuclear war or global warming completely exterminates some type of crop, in this vault we would have new seeds to recover it, and thereby restart the agricultural industry of the affected area.
As they recalled in the statement, the importance of this project began to be clear in 2015, when copies were withdrawn for the first time to create new seed banks in Morocco and Lebanon. The central seed bank of that area was located in Aleppo, Syria, and was damaged during the civil war. After that the seeds grew again, and in 2017 they were returned back to Norway.
Last year, a melting of the permafrost caused by unusually warm temperatures caused filtrations in the vault of seeds that fortunately did not cause damage, but that seem to be one of the responsible for which it has been decided to invest in improving the complex.
This, in fact, is not the only one of these characteristics, since the Artic World Archive has been working since last year. It is another backup in the same area, only instead of collecting seeds they are dedicated to safeguarding the knowledge and wisdom of the human being.