The Archive of Life
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is located within a mountain on a remote island in Norway, within the Arctic Circle. There are 1700 other seed vaults worldwide that share the goal of preserving the genes of the earth’s plant diversity that is slowly being lost. In order to accomplish this, the vaults store billions of seeds that represent the diversity of food crop seeds around the world. They hope that by preserving these seeds, it will provide a solution in the future if food crises arise.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was built to serve as a backup to the 1700 other genebanks worldwide, many of which are threatened by natural disasters, poor management and lack of funding. The Global Seed Vault is open to any of the other seed vaults that wish to send seeds to be preserved in Norway. The Global Vault has the capacity to store over 2.5 billion seeds, but currently only has 830,000 samples. The samples represent almost every country in the world, and holds the most diverse collection of food crop seeds in the world.
The Global Seed Vault is designed for long term storage and future use by the human race, however there are several details that seem to be counter intuitive to this plan. The Vault is deep within a mountainside in the Arctic Circle. Behind 4 large steel doors, down a first tunnel of 125 m and then another of 150 m, the seeds are sealed in plastic and aluminium foil, in boxes, on high shelves, frozen in one of three underground chambers, under permafrost. Oxygen levels are tightly regulated, and it is a high security facility. This is all necessary because the facility is designed to withstand nuclear strike, tectonic shifts, power outages and rising sea levels.
We have been studying archives in our ASTU class, and my classmates and I throughout the unit spent a good deal of time grumbling about the tedious procedures to look at UBC archival documents. But all we had to do was walk to the bottom of our library and lock our bags in a locker. We did not have to board a plane to one of the most remote places on earth.
Accessibility has been a key discussion point in our archives unit, and we even did a project on making the UBC archives more accessible. An example like the Global Seed Vault, an extreme version of archival accessibility, highlights the question, whether having an archive, that no one can easily access, is really worth having at all. And if it is only accessible to countries or researchers who are able to buy an expensive plane ticket and take the time to use the seeds to solve a food crises, is that really fair if you are using it as a reserve for the entire world?