Agriculture’s Noah’s Ark: The doomsday vault

AN Arctic ‘doomsday vault’ aimed at providing mankind with food in case of a global catastrophe will be designed to survive the effects of climate change, the project’s builders said as they unveiled the architectural plans.

The top-security repository, carved into the permafrost of a mountain in the remote Svalbard archipelago near the North Pole, will preserve some three million batches of seeds from all known varieties of the planet’s crops.

The hope is that the vault will make it possible to re-establish crops obliterated by major disasters.