Norway's 'seed ark' opens

A “doomsday” seed vault built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters opened today deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

“The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is our insurance policy,” Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates at the opening ceremony.

“It is the Noah’s Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations.” The vault, about 400 feet deep inside a frozen mountain, will serve as a backup for hundreds of other seed banks worldwide.

It has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples. 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.