Doomsday Seed Bank Opens This Week

Looking something like the entrance to Superman's Fortress of Solitude (the comics version anyway), the Svalbard Global Seed Vault will open this week. It is the world's insurance policy on a host of threats that could destroy important crops, from global warming and war to natural disasters like drought, flood and wildfire.
The vault's initial repository will include 250,000 varieties (10 million seeds) from virtually every country in the world. "All that can be seen of the vault outside the mountain is a concrete wedge, inside which a (410-foot) tunnel goes deep into the hillside, ending in three vaults with airlocked doors, keypad entry, stone and plastic-impregnated concrete walls," the Press Association reports.
"The air has been cooled to between -18C and -20C, but Norwegian meteorologists have calculated that without power, the vaults would still be below freezing 200 years from now under the worst climate change scenario."

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