Have you heard about the Doomsday Vault? I read about it in the paper a week or so ago. It's basically a seed bank or vault built to last 10,000 years and is situated near the North Pole. It's the coldest place they could find and they call it officially the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
This vault is located in a place ( I'm not kidding) called Longyearbyen. It's part of a series of Islands with a temperature of 30 below zero. It's due North of Europe and has a population of about 2,000 people. This place is overseen by Norway and it's very artic there to say the least. They say there are more Polar Bears and Reindeer in this place than anything else. In the winter the sun never rises. And I thought the long Maine winters were bad.
This seed ark cost 9 million dollars to build. Norway supplied the funds. Bill Gates paid for the shipping. Individual countries from all over the globe are supplying the seeds from their crops.
Scientists are collecting over a billion seeds from all over the world to keep deep inside this vault in case of a major world wide catastrophe or some sort of crop extinction. These seeds, stored in boxes, are flown in by plane. There is an airstrip at the base of the mountain where this vault is situated. The Scientists are saying they are housing seeds that took 10,000 years to develop and they don't want to lose any more than already lost as a result of extinction. Really? 10,000 years?
From the outside this vault or seed ark looks just like a big concrete wedge slammed into a mountainside. Inside there are pipes that give additional refrigeration. It is so cold in this vault that even if the earth warms and we lose all power, the vault is supposed to stay frozen for another 25 years past that.
So the question is, will this someday serve to save the world?