Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Fund with seeds inside the Svelbard Global Seed Vault that opened monday (via wapo — more images of the seed vault here).
From the WaPo:
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai of Kenya were among the dozens of guests who had bundled up for the ceremony inside the vault, about 425 feet deep inside a frozen mountain.
“This is a frozen Garden of Eden,” Barroso said, standing in one of the frosty vaults against of backdrop of large discs made of ice.
The vault will serve as a backup for hundreds of other seed banks worldwide. It has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the world and shield them from man-made and natural disasters.
Dug into the permafrost of the mountain, it has been built to withstand an earthquake or a nuclear strike.
To mark the opening, guests carried the first 75 boxes of seeds down a red carpet through the steel and concrete-lined tunnel to the vaults.
[…]
The seeds are packed in silvery foil containers — as many as 500 in each sample — and placed on blue and orange metal shelves inside three 32 foot-by-88-foot storage chambers. Each vault can hold 1.5 million sample packages of all types of crop seeds.
Meanwhile Reuters wonders why GMO seeds were left out — what do you think?
more at:
Don’t miss the movie of the grand opening from Svalbard with Norwegian singing!
—Nate Rottwenger, Make It News Seed Vault WATCH
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