Long story short, fungi are incredibly understudied compared to their sister kingdoms of animals and plants. This leads to fewer researchers studying fungi that can teach students about fungi and … you get the picture. Yet this is the typical experience in both school and higher education (in the UK and the US at least) and, unsurprisingly, when you don’t teach students about fungi, they don’t go on to study fungi. Given that fungi are a whole kingdom of species that, alongside animals and plants, belong to the major domain of planet Earth’s multicellular life together called the “ eukaryotes”, this is perhaps surprising. For one thing, fungi barely appeared in my degree, and when they did it was usually in the negative context of causing disease. If only I had an anecdote about my time as a biology undergraduate looking down the microscope at some spores for the first time, overcome by their sheer majesty – but that would be fiction. I can’t remember the moment when I first decided to study fungi. In the first study of its kind, to our knowledge, in a major seed bank, we found hundreds of fungi hidden inside seeds from the Millennium Seed Bank, some of which are likely to be species new to science and could be crucial for the future of plant health.
#You tube doomsday vault for seeds full#
We’d extracted enough DNA that the freezer, stuffed full of tubes, threatened to revolt.įinally, the time had come for me to analyze all the data, and discover just what we’d managed to find after all these months of work. We’d built a fungus city: great tower-blocks of petri dishes stacked on the lab workbenches, with different colors, textures and shapes of fungi all emerging inside. We’d spent countless hours meticulously sterilizing seeds (1,710, to be specific), filling the lab with a cacophony of rattling as we shook them in bleach. More about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.This was the moment of truth. Gene banks in Afghanistan and Iraq have also been destroyed due to war. In 2015, the gene bank in Aleppo, Syria, was threatened by the ongoing civil war and prompted researchers in the Middle East to withdraw some seeds, the Verge reported. Yes, there are as many as 1,700 versions of the vault (called gene banks) around the world, according to Time.īut the Svalbard vault is used a backup storage unit for the hundreds of thousands of varieties stored in other gene banks, some of which have been threatened in the past. "Globally, the seed vault is, and will continue to be, the safest backup of crop diversity," the statement said. The plan is to improve the vault’s construction to prevent any future incidents. "It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that," Hege Njaa Aschim of the Norwegian government told the Guardian.Īccording to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Arctic has warmed by six degrees since 1900, with a big part of the warming fueled by man-made climate change.īut for now, the vault is safe, Norway government representatives announced in a press release. » RELATED: Arctic sea ice shrinking to lowest levels ever for third straight year
When temperatures rose above normal in Spring 2017, permafrost meltwater runoff flooded the entrance of the vault and threatened the seeds stored in the vault. The Global Crop Diversity Trust (Crop Trust), Nordic Gene Bank (NordGen) and an international advisory council help manage the facility, its funding and operations.
The Global Seed Vault, which opened in 2008 was administered by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food on behalf of the Kingdom of Norway and reportedly cost approximately $9 million to build. One room in the vault houses seeds for more than 150,000 different varieties of wheat. It has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples with each sample containing about 500 seeds, so, according to the Crop Trust, a maximum of 2.25 billion seeds can be stored in the vault. More than 930,000 varieties of food crops are stored in the Global Seed Vault. » RELATED: How Georgians can watch the rare total solar eclipse this summer The vault is about 400 feet deep inside the mountain. The icy mountain housing the Seed Vault is called "Platåberget," or "plateau mountain" in English, according the Crop Trust. The vault is located on the Arctic tundra island of Spitsbergen in Svalbard, Norway. If disease pandemics, asteroid crashes, climate change or any other global catastrophes were to ensue, the seeds stored in the Global Seed Vault could be the source for humans to regrow the crops needed for survival.īut the vault was actually intended as a secure storage space for samples of other crop and plant collections at risk. Midnight sun reflects off the face of ridges on the West Coast of Spitsbergen on the morning of Midsummer on Jin Longyearbyen, Norway.
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