Noah's Arctic Ark for Seeds Set to Open

If much of civilization is ever wiped out, at least our seeds will survive.

The first specimens — 7,000 seeds from 36 African nations — have shipped to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a repository in the Arctic Circle being built to store a safety copy of vital agricultural information, in case disaster should befall us.

The vault is set to open Feb. 26. It is being built by the Norwegian government (Svalbard is part of the Kingdom of Norway), and when it opens its operation will be funded by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a nongovernmental organization.

In order to protect humanity's agricultural heritage, the seed bank will hoard refrigerated samples of most of the world's food crops in a chamber dug 400 feet deep into the side of a frozen mountain on the island of Svalbard.