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Svalbard Global Seed Vault Will Preserve 100 Million Seeds Through Refrigeration |
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Friday, 28 March 2008 |
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The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built near the
village of Longyearbyen on the remote island of Spitsbergen, Norway, recently
opened, receiving inaugural shipments of 100 million seeds that originated in
over 100 countries. The first deposits into the seed vault represent the most
comprehensive and diverse collection of food crop seeds being held anywhere in
the world. The opening of the seed vault is part of an unprecedented effort to
protect the planet’s rapidly diminishing biodiversity.
 As well as protecting
against the daily loss of diversity, the vault could also prove indispensable
for restarting agricultural production at the regional or global level in the
wake of a natural or man-made disaster. Even in the worst-case scenarios of
global warming, the vault rooms will remain naturally frozen for up to 200
years. The seeds will be stored at minus 18 degrees Celsius (minus 0.4 degrees
Fahrenheit). The low temperature and moisture level inside the vaults will
ensure low metabolic activity, keeping the seeds viable. According to the
iniciative’s press release, if properly stored and maintained at minus 20
degrees Celsius (about minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit), some seeds in the vault
will be viable for a millennium or more.
Engineers
are essentially using rock as a “cold store,” said project manager Magnus
Bredeli Tveiten with Statsbygg, the Norwegian government’s Directorate of
Public Construction, an approach that has become popular on the Norwegian
mainland as a way to establish energy efficient refrigeration systems. To do
this, workers brought in a temporary 30 kilowatt refrigeration system from the mainland
and are using it to establish an -18 degree temperature approximately 10 meters deep into the
sandstone surrounding the vault. Tveiten said past experience has shown that
the rock should stay sufficiently cold over a long period of time to allow a -18 C temperature in the
vault to be maintained by a smaller, permanent 10 kilowatt system. He said the
long-term cooling process also is aided by the natural permafrost in the area
and the snow and ice that covers the mountain for much of the year—all of which
ensure that the rock stays at least at -4 C. |
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