Inside The Arctic Doomsday Seed Vault For The First Time (360 Video)

sois Bard is an archipelago situated in the Arctic Ocean midway between continental Norway and the North Pole the Norwegian sovereign islands are the northernmost settlement in the world home to just 2,000 people and aside from a small number of researchers and tourists hoping to spot a polar bear few people know of this place yet spar bard actually plays a pivotal role in ensuring humanity's continual survival so why exactly is this place so important it's because of this the spar bard global Seed Vault sometimes referred to as the Doomsday bowl set 120 metres inside a mountain this secure underground facility is capable of storing up to two point two five billion seeds collected from 4.5 million crop varieties around the world basically what lies behind these metal doors is the ultimate insurance policy for the entire planets food supply I always feeling going into Cathedral when I get there it's just so amazingly quiet and you get this divine feeling it's a history of agriculture in there and it's potentially also the future of agriculture in there so to me in a very very special place that was Marie Hager executive director of the global crop diversity trust the organization that manages the vault since it opened in 2008 the trust has collected catalogued and stored eight hundred and sixty thousand seed samples deposited by gene banks from across the planet those are huge repositories that preserve genetic material Russian seeds and Ukrainian seeds are literally on the same shelf yes there are seeds from South Korea from North Korea well basically from all over the world the seeds sit in three cold storage rooms kept at a constant minus 18 degrees Celsius the cool temperature ensures that the seeds remain viable for decades and in some cases thousands of years just in case the gene banks who donated them ever need them again and ultimately that is one of the major reasons why the vault was set up in the first place while there are around 1,700 gene banks in the world these facilities can be vulnerable to things like political instability natural disasters and war and if the seeds inside these banks become compromised the loss can pose a significant threat to global food security ideally we want to have a copy of each accession in every dream back in the world in small part because we can hope that things don't go wrong in the world but occasionally things do go wrong and and we have lost completes in banks we have lost in banks in Iraq we have lost tree in banks in Afghanistan the dream bank in the Philippines was first struck by a tsunami and then it was then it caught fire so it's just illustration is why it is important to have a backup system until recently no one had ever put the system to the test but that all changed with the outbreak of war in Syria so one of the most important green banks in the world is in Aleppo in Syria due to the war situation of the Dene bank cannot operate as it as it should the seeds are safe but the land around the green bank cannot be used so they can't duplicate seeds they can share seeds with farmers and breeders and scientists the gene bank in Aleppo held ancient varieties of wheat and durum that dated back to the dawn of Agriculture some 10,000 years ago essentially hundreds of crop varieties had taken thousands of years to cultivate we're at stake losing these crops would have proved devastating for global food security so in September 2015 the global Seed Vault received an urgent request from Aleppo asking them to make a withdrawal and we have then been working with that in Bank in Aleppo for quite a few years now and almost all of their collections are copied in Svalbard they decided to take seeds out of the world in in fall apart and then re-establish that in Bank so you will see in the world that there are some holes in the racks there should have been some boxes there the seeds quite simply have been shipped that ever have been shipped and tomorrow hope and Lebanon a total of 128 crates of seeds holding around 30,000 samples of wheat barley lentil and chickpea among others were removed but the seeds couldn't be sent back to war-torn Syria instead the samples were shipped to Morocco in Lebanon until they were able to re-establish the gene back in Syria they're being grown out there now so they will re-establish the gene banks there and when they have the first yield they then we'll send seeds again back to Albert while the seed bank in Svalbard isn't the only solution to global food security it is reassuring to know that seed varieties from all parts of the globe are being held here safe and secure ready to be used in the next time of crisis and now will Aleppo we have seen that the Svalbard global seed world works as it should when things go wrong it is possible to go to the world retrieve the material and then re-establish the collections you

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Keywords: svalbard, seed vault, global, crop trust, food security, shortage, arctic, north pole, ecology, seeds, norway, doomsday, storage, world, united nations, world war 3, famine, war, syria, north korea, science, environment, travel, 360, experience, 360 video, spherical, vr, virtual reality, seeker vr, seeker, journalism, news, curiosity, discovery

Id: _LlLsTGKBag

Length: 6min 12sec (372 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 29 2016