That's me!
I'm on Svalbard, an archipelago 800 miles from the North Pole.
There are polar bears and glaciers, and also the most amazing genetic library I have ever
seen...
Howdy seeders of knowledge, Trace here for DNews.
If you’ve never heard of Svalbard before, it’s this place right here.
Waaay up there on top of the planet.
It's far away from civilization, but Svalbard might be one of the most important places
in the world.
The place in charge of protecting the future of our food.
In there, you have 13,000 years history of agriculture.
It's quite amazing.
That's Marie Haga, she's the Executive Director of the CropTrust, the group that oversees
the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
Inside that vault are boxes, and inside the boxes?
Seeds.
Quite simply, seeds.
Normally somewhere between 300 and 500 seeds in these aluminum foil envelopes, and that's
all there is.
Nothing else.
Seed vaults exist in most nations.
There are 1750 of them across the planet.
But sometimes, they fail.
This is where the Svalbard Global Seed Vault comes in.
We collect seeds from absolutely all over the world, or countries or institutions and
jails choose to use this as a backup facility.
The main reason it's so far North is because Svalbard is cold.
It's got a permafrost, meaning the ground never really thaws, even in the summer.
Seeds like to be stored long term at minus 18 degrees.
It's a great advantage then when the permafrost gives minus 6 at the outset.
By digging a 130 meter tunnel deep into the mountain, the vault is under that permafrost,
meaning they only had to cool it the remaining 12 celsius.
At that temperature, the 860 thousand varieties currently in the vault can be held for decades;
some wheat varieties could last a 1000 years!
But it wouldn't be DNews if we didn't say more research is needed.
They don't have this all figured out.
Seeds have been saved by farmers since the dawn of agriculture, but saving for a year
is one thing, they're talking about saving them for GENERATIONS.
That's not easy.
Especially since our bananas don't even have seeds, so CropTrust uses cryopreservation
for those, same with coconuts.
So, nations around the world put their seeds in this Vault on Svalbard.
But CropTrust doesn't own them.
See, Svalbard is governed by Norway, but party to an international demilitarization treaty;
meaning it's neutral ground for places like Russia and Ukraine, whose seeds sit on the
same shelf… even the hermit kingdom of North Korea can store their seeds there.
But aside from serving as a backup for the global food machine, the Seed Vault also represents
something else…
a genetic library of evolutionary successes.
Wheat originates in, certainly the Middle East, probably in Syria.
Now we grow wheat absolutely all over the world.
It has taken many thousand years for these plants to move around the globe.
The challenge these days is really that the climate changes so fast, so the plants are
not able to adapt.
// This is why we need to introduce, for example, genes from a wild relative.
That can ma ke sure that wheat can grow in funny climates, with, for example, less water.
Or that it's able to fight a new disease that stems from climate change.
We actually think that these wild relatives of the domesticated species can really be
game changers in the way that we develop plants.
So scientists are tirelessly travelling the world to gather more seeds, and bring those
into the vault too.
They gotta GROW that library, know what I mean?
Pun intended.
But it's not a joke, because farmers don't want to GROW all these crops; they need to
make dollahs.
And they and agribusinesses grow for YIELD.
But, when we choose yield over diversity, we lose genetic variety.
We in the U.S. only have about 10 percent of the variety of fruits and vegetables that
used to exist.
So if a disease strikes, say bananas, like is happening now, they could go extinct, and
there's nothing we can do; there aren't any other varieties to experiment with.
Which is why we're cataloging and saving seeds in this vault…
There are 4500 varieties of potatoes, 3000 varieties of coconuts, 35,000 varieties of
corn, 125,000 varieties of wheat, or 200,000 varieties of rice.
// One of those might have the trait that we need in the future to adapt the rice to
whatever it is, higher temperature, higher salinity in the soil, more unpredictable weather,
a variety that can fight a new pest or a new disease.
For each one, we lose.
We lose options to develop plants with traits in the future.
There are 29 crops in the world that are the MOST important.
Rice, wheat, corn, potatoes, coconuts, barley… and a number of others, but even though we
don't grow them all we need to save these thousands of varieties, and once they're sequenced
their genetic information can be mined to create the future of biodiversity.
In the end, the Seed Vault isn't just a place where seeds sit, waiting to be genetically
sequenced, and grown again to secure our food supply for the 9 or 15 billion people who
will live on the Earth of the future.
It's also library of nature's trial and error for dealing with the shifting planet we live
on, and it's one of humanity's greatest science projects.
It's ongoing, it's complicated, and it's just plain awe inspiring.