The year is 2060. The world as it was known no longer exists. Science and technology battle a surprisingly personalised Mother Nature. She is angry - very angry. The reason?Global warming has really kicked in. There has been a sequence of catastrophes, one worse than the next. Storms stormed, wildfires raged, sea levels rose with polar melting. The great Siberian peat bog thaw of 2040 seems to have been a final feedback loop too far.
After that, the coastal cities were submerged and all was changed, changed utterly. Food shortages then famines, riots then wars, a Hobbesian war of all against all.
Humanity is now, in this year 2060, on the brink of the brink - just as Newton predicted in 1704. The weather is wild, the population ragged. Somehow, a crew is cobbled together on a voyage to the top of the world. Just south of the North Pole seems cruelly far to go for mere seeds, given the state of the planet, but that's where the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is.
Rewind to 2009, and even with modern communication and transport technology, an island 1000 km north of Norway in permafrost seems remote. The Global Seed Vault (GSV) is in Svalbard�s permafrost, just outside the town of Longyearbyen.
Owned by the Norwegian government, the GSV cost them nearly 6 million Euro (50 million NOK) to build.
The seeds will be stored over 100 metres into a the solid stone of an Arctic mountain, at a temperature of minus 18 degrees Celsius.
The GSV itself is made up of three mountain halls. Each hall is around 1500 cubic metres in size That's 25 metres deep, 10 metres wide and 6 metres high.
This allows for storage space for 4.5 million seed samples, or 2 billion seeds. There are additional refrigeration units inside the mountain.
The initial shipments, packed in aluminium bags, placed in sealed boxes and shipped to Svalbard, totaled 268,000 distinct samples of seeds, weighing more than 10 tonnes.
These seeds may be retrieved from their frozen hibernation inside the mountains of Svalbard and be sent back to their original locations if needed. They remain the property of the donors, and are all duplicates of seeds saved and stored at locations around the world.
Even with a long term absence of electricity, duplicates of the world's agriculture crop collections will be safeguarded against possible future disasters such as wars and dangerous climate change.
According to the Global Crop Diversity Trust: �even in the worst-case scenarios of global warming, the vault rooms will remain naturally frozen for up to 200 years�.
While the construction of the seed vault and its ongoing maintenance is funded by the Norwegian government, the operation and management of the Seed Vault, as well as the transport of the seeds from developing countries is funded by the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust has raised 260 million US Dollars to conserve seeds. Current donors include governments, foundations, corporations and individuals. As of June 2009, these include companies such as DuPont and Syngenta, organisations such as the World Bank and seventeen governments. Largest Donors have been the UK, the US, Norway, Australia, Sweden, Brazil, Switzerland, Germany and Canada, with the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation being the other standout donor.
Almost two thirds of a million seeds from the reference collections of Teagasc and the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (DAFF) were deposited in February. 677 unique accessions containing a total of 662,190 seeds were deposited.
According to DAFF �a selection of crop species uniquely associated with Ireland�s formal plant breeding programme, agricultural history and culture� was made.
The selections included named varieties produced by the State�s breeding stations over the past century and which were commercially successful, unnamed breeding lines from crop breeding programmes and material collected over the past 30 years by Irish crop breeders from the wild in Ireland.
The material selected �represents genetically diverse crop germplasm that may have a future agronomic value and play an important part in helping Irish agriculture adapt to future challenges such as climate change�, DAFF claimed when asked about the seeds chosen.
The seed selected came from two different seedbanks and consisted of three main crop types - forage grasses, potatoes and cereals. The first was the seedbank at the Teagasc Crops Research Centre, Oakpark, Co. Carlow, where the State�s forage grasses and potato seed collections are conserved and the second was the seedbank at DAFFs National Crop Variety Testing Centre, Backweston, Leixlip, Co. Kildare, where the main cereal seed collections for the State are held.
E77.12. That's how much it cost for the Irish government to make its deposit . This was the courier delivery cost to Oslo. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault administration covered the final leg of the journey's cost, and no delegation went.
According to the Minister of state Trevor Sargent TD, the GSV will help ensure �future crop diversity and promote global food security�. He also pointed to �the skill, dedication and hard work of the plant breeders in Ireland over our recent history�.
In marking the delivery to the GSV, the minister cited the past and the present. This included the Department's collection in Backweston, the Albert Agricultural College in Glasnevin, Dublin and the Crop Breeding programme in UCD �where most of the oats and wheat seed that make up the deposit were originally sourced�.
He also noted the contribution of Ireland's full national potato collection in the Tops Potato Centre in Raphoe, and seed sourced originally from the Malting Barley Breeding Programme in Ballinacurra, Co. Cork. The latter �like all the other cereal breeding programmes in Ireland has ceased operations but nevertheless some the most valuable crop germplasm from this and the other aforementioned breeding stations continues to be conserved and maintained in the Department's facilities in Backweston�.
He also highlighted the important work carried out by Teagasc, Oak Park and DAFF in maintaining these valuable reference seed collection, forage and potato breeding programmes
The Irish government have made an annual contribution of �1 million to the Trust from Irish Aid over the past 3 years.
Not everyone is completely enamored with 'the Vault'....
who?
and why?
Check the next posting.....
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