Archinect - News

Norwegian government dedicates $4.4M to upgrade Arctic seed vault

2017-06-14T12:06:00-04:00

The Global Seed Vault, built in the Arctic as an impregnable deep freeze for the world’s most precious food seeds, is to undergo a multi-million dollar upgrade after water from melting permafrost flooded its access tunnel. No seeds were damaged but the incident undermined the original belief that the vault would be a “failsafe” facility, securing the world’s food supply forever. Now the Norwegian government, which owns the vault, has committed $4.4m (NOK37m) to improvements.

Tour Norway's "Doomsday" seed vault, deep within the Arctic Circle

2016-06-15T13:24:00-04:00

What is the architecture of forward-thinking climate change? One example is the Svalbard Seed Vault, which when full will house roughly 3 million different species of plants in anticipation of a future that may be hotter, drier, or simply climatically different than the one we inhabit now.

This video offers a rare tour of the three-vault, minus 5 degrees Celsius interior storage facility, which is located within a mountain in Norway in anticipation of rising global sea levels: