Doomsday fridge aims to store seeds that will rescue civilisation

A “DOOMSDAY vault” hewn out of a Norwegian mountain is planned to safeguard the world’s food crops in case of global disaster.

The huge room, on an ice-bound island just 1,000km from the North Pole, is aimed at securing the future of humanity in the event of a nuclear war or other doomsday scenario, such as an asteroid impact.

The Norwegian government plans to create the vault, designed to hold around two million seeds, next year.

All the world’s food crops will be represented, New Scientist magazine reported.

“If the worst came to the worst, this would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet,” said Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust which is promoting the project.

The €2.4 million vault will be constructed deep inside a sandstone mountain lined with permafrost on the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen.

It will have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete, and be protected behind two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors.

To survive, the seeds need to be frozen. The plan is to replace the air inside the vault each winter, when temperatures on Spitsbergen fall to around minus 18C.

“This will be the world’s most secure gene bank by some orders of magnitude,” said Mr Fowler. “But its seeds will only be used when all other samples have gone for some reason. It is a fail-safe depository, rather than a conventional seed bank.”

There is growing concern for the safety of existing seed banks around the world.

In the late 1980s, terrorists ransacked an international potato seed bank in the Peruvian Andes.