Doomsday vault meaning6/5/2023 And this relates back directly to how “copies” are made. If they just put seeds in their vaults and forgot about them, sooner or later they will die, because nothing lasts forever. Institutions that hold seeds in long-term cold storage must grow out their stock every so often. This is a great question, and one that is often overlooked. How does an institution even make “copies” of seeds? So the Vault contains backup copies of seeds. Hopefully this chart can give you a snapshot of what scientists expect from what we know about long-term seed storage. However, all things being equal, we do have a sense of how long certain crops should last in cold storage. This also is dependent on how well the seeds were prepared in their packaging before shipment to the Vault. This is actually a complicated question, because it varies between different crops. But how long can seeds really stay viable up there? Should anything disastrous occur to an institution itself, the seeds will still be protected in Svalbard and can be resupplied to the seed bank that experienced the loss. But, with Svalbard, these institutions can have their stock in two places. If a seed bank is destroyed, and those particular varieties only existed in that one seed bank, then that diversity is lost forever. As the film details, there is great fragility in our global seed banks. But most of these seed banks don’t have robust backup systems for their stocks, which is where Svalbard comes in. These seed banks conserve crop diversity for use in crop breeding efforts so that farmers have access to disease and pest resistant varieties. The primary purpose of the vault is to act as a failsafe backup for the roughly 1,400 seed banks all around the world. When it first opened, the news media quickly labeled it as “The Doomsday Vault.” But this is a misnomer. That would take enormous facilities located all over the world. The Seed Vault was never meant to supply seeds directly to farmers. The simple answer is: it won’t directly or immediately. How will the Svalbard Global Seed Vault help us re-populate the world’s food supply in the event of widespread famine or apocalyptic disaster?
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