The Seattle Times: Nation & World: “Doomsday vault” on Arctic isle would protect world’s seeds

The high-security vault, almost half the length of a football field, will be carved into a mountain on a remote island above the Arctic Circle. If the looming fences, motion detectors and steel airlock doors are not disincentive enough for anyone hoping to breach the facility’s concrete interior, the polar bears roaming outside should help.

Important due to the fact that we only rely on 12 plant species —

Historically, humans utilized more than 7,000 plant species to meet their basic food needs, Esquinas says. Today, due to the limitations of modern large-scale, mechanized farming, only 150 plant species are under cultivation, and the majority of humans live on only 12 plant species, according to research by the Food and Agriculture Organization.



  1. moss says:

    And two of those species are used for producing beer.

  2. joshua says:

    #1…Moss….Beer is after all a health food!!!!

  3. Raff says:

    Ooo I wonder if they have controlled seeds like Marijuana and Opium Poppies and coca?

  4. Floyd says:

    Most of the best tasting tomato varieties (like Early GIrl, Rutgers, Better Boy) are only grown in home gardens, because they can’t be machine picked.

  5. RTaylor says:

    If we get knocked back to the stone age, just how are we going the schlep up to the Arctic and open this thing?

  6. BgScryAnml says:

    Should there not be two vaults in different hemispheres? If the asteroid were to strike Svalbard. While we’re at it, put a third on the Moon.

  7. Smartalix says:

    #1,

    Everyone forgets yeast.

  8. Max Bell says:

    So W, Cheney, Rove and company emerge from Vault 99 after the apocalypse, climb into Arc-1, and head off to the pole to bust into the thing…

    Then, a few days later, W turns on his Pip Boy, trying to figure out how to get it to play his MP3s, and everybody is completely stunned when it plays back the instructions for how to decant the truckload of freeze-dried Mexicans inside the G.E.C.K. and they learn they weren’t supposed to eat the seeds…

  9. John Schumann says:

    They should put beads and a lot of gold in there to buy some land to plant on. It seems difficult to loot.

  10. Karl Viklund says:

    Well, this is really nothing new.
    We have something like this in Sweden. It’s like a big cave inside the mountain where they store all kinds of plants and stuff.

  11. Rebel says:

    I’d love to start a conspiracy that some rich corporation or government is building a safe-house, and then they are going to destroy our current seeds with some bacteria. This way the corporation would have the safe house to sell back to us for a fortune, or the government could use this to control populations.

    wonder how far something like this could get whacked out of proportion??

  12. named says:

    #8 Go Fallout! Don’t forget, one of them has the endure the challenge to be accepted in the quest to save the village.

  13. Angel H. Wong says:

    Smartalix:

    If you have a woman you won’t need yeast *ducks*


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