A Backup for the World’s Seeds

About 1,700 genebanks worldwide conserve the crop diversity that plant breeders and farmers draw on to adapt to pests, disease and climate. Many are vulnerable — not only to war and natural disaster but to underfunding, poor management or, as the Crop Trust notes, something as mundane as a failing freezer. A lost variety cannot be recreated.

The vault offers free, long-term storage of duplicate samples. Depositors keep legal ownership and the seeds are held under “black box” conditions: only the depositing institution can withdraw its own boxes. The storage halls sit more than 100 metres inside the mountain under 40 to 60 metres of rock. Seeds are kept at −18°C in sealed foil packages, and the surrounding permafrost is intended to keep them frozen even if power fails. NordGen handles deposits and maintains the public Seed Portal database.

As of the vault’s latest published figures, it holds 1,401,285 seed samples from 134 depositors, out of a stated capacity of 4.5 million varieties. (The Crop Trust’s page still shows an earlier May 2024 count of 1,301,397; we use the vault’s own current figure.) The backup has been used: after the Syrian civil war prevented the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) from maintaining its genebank in Syria, it made the vault’s first-ever withdrawal, regenerating the seeds in Lebanon and Morocco. The vault’s limits are just as important. It protects only what has been collected and deposited, it does not keep seeds alive in fields or replace active genebanks, and its entrance tunnel has needed waterproofing and drainage works to keep water out.