![]() ![]() 'The experience felt like one straight out of a James Bond film but the biggest reward is the education our world will receive about this important work, especially amid rising climate concerns.' Svalbard and, specifically, the town of Longyearbyen, which sits adjacent to the site of the Doomsday Vault, have been experiencing warming at an unparalleled rate in recent years The Climate in Svalbard 2100 report was commissioned by the Norwegian Environment Agency. 'With rumours of polar bears lurking nearby, we shot in freezing temperatures of around -20☌ (-4☏) in hazardous materials gear, while ensuring our equipment functioned properly to produce the best possible image quality from the air and ground.' 'But this great honour didn't come without challenges as the building is buried in Arctic permafrost. He said: 'The experience filming the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and very humbling. Neil Henderson, the owner of The Virtual Tour Experts, travelled to Svalbard to film the vault's interior himself. It has been developed in collaboration with the Crop Trust to celebrate the Seed Vault's 15th anniversary. The tour, which takes you around the stunning Arctic landscape as well as inside the vault, was designed by The Virtual Tour Experts, a company based in Devon, UK. ![]() He said: 'The experience filming the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and very humbling' Neil Henderson, the owner of The Virtual Tour Experts, travelled to Svalbard to film the vault's interior himself. In Zambia, for example, the Plant Genetic Resources Centre of the Southern Africa Development Community has been providing to farmers a type of grass called sorghum, which is used for flour and can grow rapidly in dry conditions. Seed banks are also increasingly being called upon to help farmers adapt to global warming. The grains, bulbs, rice and other seeds in Svalbard keeps are only to be used in the event that the originals are lost as a result of regional or global crises.įor example, the national seed bank of the Philippines was damaged by flooding and subsequently destroyed in a fire in 2012, while facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq were destroyed in conflict. Regional vaults help to maintain a diversity of different plant varieties and provide seeds when needed to support agricultural efforts. It is primarily intended to serve as a back-up for other seed banks around the world which store valuable plant species. However, the specific species with the most seeds at Svalbard is Pearl Millet, a nutritious grain that grows in arid regions, with 84 million. Rice is by far the most common seed type stored, with 85 million seeds, and 82 million of these being Asian varieties like oryza sativa. They even store 100,000 seeds for hallucinogenic plants such as cannabis and opium, but no genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as Norwegian law prohibits them. There are similar programmes, such as the Global Seed Vault which houses over 1 million samples of seeds on Svalbard, an island between Norway and the North Pole.The majority of these are species of food crops, with 69 per cent being grains, 9 per cent legumes and the rest being fruits, vegetables, herbs and other plants. Because human civilisation has such a large footprint if it were to collapse, that could have a negative cascading effect on the rest of us.” “As humans, we had a close call about 75,000 years ago with the Toba supervolcanic eruption, which caused a 1,000 year cooling period and, according to some, aligns with an estimated drop in human diversity. “Earth is a naturally volatile environment.” Jekan Thanga said, a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Arizona, in a statement. The scientists labelled it “a modern global insurance policy” for over 6 million species found on Earth, acting as insurance against the decimation of our planet. These would be cryogenically frozen, stored away in tunnels underneath the moon’s surface, CNN reports. Proposed items to go in this bunker include seeds, spores, sperm and egg samples from various Earth species, according to scientists. Scientists want to create an underground structure to store materials that can save us in case of an apocalypse-style situation. ![]()
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