Svalbard Global Seed Vault to receive rare seeds deposits

Tags: Science and Technology

The Svalbard Global seed vault  on Spitsbergen island halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole is only opened a few times a year to limit its seed banks' exposure to the outside world.

On 14 February 2022,the  gene banks from Sudan, Uganda, New Zealand, Germany and Lebanon will deposit seeds, including millet(bajra), sorghum(Jowar) and wheat, as back-ups to their own collections in the vault.

• The Seed Vault is owned and administered by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food on behalf of the Kingdom of Norway and is established as a service to the world community.

• The Svalbard Global Seed Vault provides insurance against both incremental and catastrophic loss of crop diversity held in traditional genebanks around the world. The Seed Vault offers long-term protection for one of the most important natural resources on earth.

• The vault is located an extraordinary 120 metres (393.7 feet) into the rock, ensuring that the vault rooms will remain naturally frozen even in the event of failure of the mechanical cooling system and rising external air temperatures due to climate change.

• The Seed Vault has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples.

• The vault at present  holds over 1.1 million seed samples of nearly 6,000 plant species from 89 seed banks globally,  and serves  as a backup for plant breeders to develop new crop varieties.

• The world used to cultivate more than 6,000 different plants but U.N. experts say we now get about 40% of our calories from three main crops -- maize, wheat and rice -- making food supplies vulnerable if climate change causes harvests to fail.

Important for  Exams 

 Important Place  

Svalbard : Norway