"Deposit of the apocalypse" received goods

Humanity is also preparing for an extreme crisis situation. A warehouse set up in an area of the Arctic covered in ice to save the world's agricultural crops from extinction has received batches of seeds from the largest number of new contributors to date, an administrator of this has announced. remote units. The Svalbard Global Seed Reserve, stored in permafrost caves on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, halfway between Europe and the North Pole, is a project launched in 2008 as a last-resort solution for the world's gene banks to protect plants against the risks of war, disease and climate change. The Arctic repository, nicknamed the "Repository of the Apocalypse" over the years received samples from all over the world and played an essential role between 2015 and 2019 in the reconstruction of seed collections damaged during the war in Syria. This week, depositors carried crates of seeds to the entrance to the warehouse, a long, narrow structure that juts out from a snow-covered hillside. Twenty-three seed banks participated in the operation, nine of them for the first time, the largest number of new contributors in a single shipment, said the Crop Trust, an NGO that manages the repository together with Norwegian authorities. . Among the new contributors are seed banks from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cameroon, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria and Zambia, Crop Trust representatives said. The crates brought now contain seeds of crops such as beans, barley, broad beans, corn, rice, millet and sorghum. "Conserving genetic diversity in this Arctic stronghold ensures the adaptability and resilience of our crops, guaranteeing food security for future generations," said Crop Trust chief executive Stefan Schmitz. After this delivery, 111 seed banks from 77 countries have a reserve of their plants in Svalbard, announced the Ministry of Agriculture and Food of Norway. The storage rooms, which are only opened three times a year to limit the exposure of the seeds to environmental factors from the outside world, are maintained at a constant temperature of -18 degrees Celsius.