Backing Up the World's Food Supply with 800,000 Plant Species on Ice

In March 2008, on a remote Norwegian island in the Arctic circle the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, or "doomsday vault," took its first deposits. The vault's builders had spent the prior year blasting a tunnel and three chambers into the mountainside's permafrost. To be stored within each chamber? Treasure. The doomsday vault was constructed to store the world's agriculture heritage in deep freeze, should the worst happen. Six years on, and following a recent deposit of 20,000 species, the vault no...