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The Doomsday Vault: A Backup Plan to Save the World’s Crops

There is some good news for the humans that survive a potential apocalypse...
Visual Capitalist creates and curates enriched visual content focused on emerging trends in business and investing. Founded in 2011 in Vancouver, the team at Visual Capitalist believes that art, data, and storytelling can be combined in a manner that makes complex issues and processes more digestible. Covering high-growth opportunities and industries such as technology, mining, and energy, Visual Capitalist reaches millions of investors each year. Visual Capitalist’s infographics have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Zero Hedge, Maclean’s, Gizmodo, The Vancouver Sun, and Business Insider.
Visual Capitalist creates and curates enriched visual content focused on emerging trends in business and investing. Founded in 2011 in Vancouver, the team at Visual Capitalist believes that art, data, and storytelling can be combined in a manner that makes complex issues and processes more digestible. Covering high-growth opportunities and industries such as technology, mining, and energy, Visual Capitalist reaches millions of investors each year. Visual Capitalist’s infographics have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Zero Hedge, Maclean’s, Gizmodo, The Vancouver Sun, and Business Insider.

Via Pierre J.

Imagine that the unthinkable has happened.

A massive asteroid impact triggers a “nuclear winter” effect, or one of the world’s most dangerous supervolcanoes erupts. Maybe Donald Trump gets in an epic Twitter (TWTR) feud with Kim Jong-Un that initiates World War III.

Either way, things are going sideways, and the fate of human civilization itself is at stake. Will everything be lost?

Enter the ‘Doomsday Vault’

Well, besides the fact that the world’s cities have been replaced by smoking craters, there is some good news for the humans that survive a potentially apocalyptic scenario.

On a remote island that is just 800 miles (1,300 km) from the North Pole, the Norwegian government has built a failsafe in the freezing cold that protects thousands of the most vital crops from extinction. Officially called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, it already holds close to a million samples of crops around the world, with each sample holding about 500 seeds.

Today’s infographic, from Futurism, has more on this Doomsday Vault that could one day help to save civilization:

Carved 390 ft (120 m) into a sandstone mountain in a Norwegian archipelago, the vault keeps the temperature of seeds well below freezing while also limiting humidity. This minimizes metabolic activity, which means that the seed vault will likely be able to preserve seeds for most major crops for thousands of years.

Already Handy Once

Despite remaining a pragmatic backup plan for the worst case global scenarios, the Doomsday Vault has already come in handy just a few years into its existence. In 2015, war-torn Syria was the first country to withdraw seeds from the vault in order to replace those lost in Aleppo due to the ongoing civil conflict.

The wheat, barley, and grass seeds from the Aleppo bank are thought to have important traits resistant to drought, which researchers think could be increasingly important in the face of climate change.

They're now able to use AI to assess data generated by everything from drills and trucks to conveyors and ships.