Doomsday Vault Opening

A repository of seeds inj case of catastrophe. [Link]

A vault carved into the Arctic permafrost and filled with samples of the world's most important seeds will be inaugurated Tuesday, providing a Noah's Ark of food crops in the event of a global catastrophe.

Aimed at safeguarding biodiversity in the face of climate change, wars and other natural and man-made disasters, the new seed bank has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million batches, or twice the number of crop varieties believed to exist in the world today, according to the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT), which spearheaded the project.

With European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso looking on, Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg will inaugurate the vault by symbolically depositing a few grains of rice in one of its three spacious cold chambers.

Norway has assumed the entire six-million-euro (8.9-million-dollar) charge for building the vault in its Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, just some 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) from the North Pole.

There are currently more than 200,000 different varieties of rice and wheat in the world, but this diversity is rapidly disappearing due to pests and diseases, climate change and human activities.