An Age of Magic

Don’t worry about doomsday - the seeds are safe

Norway has it all sewn up in case life on earth gets blasted away. A “Doomsday” seed vault opens this week in the Arctic to preserve crops in the face of climate change, war and natural disasters.The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is intended as a back-up to the network of seed banks around the world which store, grow and replenish thousands of varieties of crops.  At the vault’s official opening tomorrow a quarter of a million samples - totalling around 10 million seeds - from virtually every country in the world will be carried deep into the mountain in Svalbard, to the north of mainland Norway.

It is no exaggeration that wars, droughts, floods and human kind are all combining to destroy our vast resources of seeds and plant life - so what better way to preserve them…and at what better time? It is the diversity that is being threatened and that is what this scheme is attempting to save. Diversity is threatened by climate change and we all know about that don’t we.

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