The Svalbard Global Seed Vault or the Doomsday Vault is a seed storage facility for the world’s agricultural crops that can help in combating the effects of climate change, population growth, extinction of crop species and destruction of gene banks.
Built like a bomb shelter in a blue mountain in Norway is a contingency storage facility for a resource that is more necessary than any other consumables in the world. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, popularly known as the ‘Doomsday Vault’ is a storage facility for seed samples of the planet’s agricultural crops. Its primary purpose is to utilise these crop samples in the event if one or many varieties of crops suffer extinction.
The facility is located on the island of Spitsbergen, in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, which is about halfway between the Arctic Circle and the North Pole. It is a storage facility cut into a mountain with tunnels running through to rooms inside the mountain. This structure is expected to protect the seeds from events such as rising sea levels and earthquakes and also from seasonal vagaries. The permafrost and thick rock ensure that even if the power is turned off, the temperature inside the structure does not rise to more than 4oC below zero.
This story is from the May/June 2017 edition of Geography and You.
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This story is from the May/June 2017 edition of Geography and You.
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Covid-19: Politics Of Knowledge, Public Health And The World Order
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The global challenge of COVID-19 is still unfurling. States are grappling to control its remorseless spread with varied success and its impact both on long and short-term scales are still being understood. However, a distinct urban bias in its spread across the globe and universal response of lockdown and social distancing for its control has brought pertinent questions to the fore. Urban planning and the future of our cities in terms of urban life and city form therefore needs to be revisited. In India, the exodus of migrant workers from its large cities has added yet another dimension to this challenge.
PAUSE AND REBOOT
REFLECTIONS ON ECONOMY, SOCIETY AND POLITY DURING COVID-19 GLOBAL PANDEMIC AND LESSONS FOR INDIA
Migrants & borders: My wishlist in a post-Covid-19 world
Former Professor of Economics and Education, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. bkhadria@gmail.com.
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