Doomsday vault' building starts

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,19515381-1702,00.html

NORWAY will begin construction today of a "doomsday vault", a vast top-security seed bank in a mountain near the North Pole to ensure food supplies in the event of environmental catastrophe or nuclear war.

Built with Fort Knox-type security, the $US3 million ($4.1 million) depository will preserve around two million seeds representing all known varieties of the world's crops at sub-zero temperatures.

"This facility will provide a practical means to re-establish crops obliterated by major disasters," Cary Fowler, executive secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, said in a statement.

snip

The vault will be built deep in permafrost in the side of a sandstone mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, 1000km from the North Pole.

What a sick joke.

all kinds of disasters, natural or man made. If a sustained drought wipes out all of the seed in an African country this could be the only way they could get new seed to start over.

I just hope that the few remaining humans can find the stash.

"Be the first on your block with your own bomb shelter"! As a produst of the fifties I remember being taught to always look for those public shelter signs. What a bizarre game that was for kids to see how many they could find in their community! It did not make kids feel any safer. Somehow knowing seeds are safely tucked away somewhere does make me any safer either!

...non-crop seed banks are currently in progress in Brasil and the UK.

Ever wonder what they know that you don't?

And re-establishing crops from such a tiny seed source would take _years_.

While this facility might provide some assurance against an environmental catastrophe, and it makes interesting press, it seems to me the facility is much more likely to live out its service as a gene bank used by ag research and in litigations concerning GM crops.