The seed vault

The seed vault

A lot of countries need different types of seeds so they can plant them again. There is an important reason for this. Sometimes plants don’t grow in a country because of bad weather or disease and so farmers need new seeds. 

You can store seeds in a ‘seed vault’. It’s a place at a special temperature. The seeds don’t grow, but they can live for a long time. Norway has the biggest seed vault in the world – the Svalbard Global Seed Vault – and it has seeds from a lot of different countries. 

The vault is on the island of Spitsbergen. The island is about one thousand kilometres from the North Pole. It’s a very cold place so it’s good for seeds. Above the ground, the doorway is small, but inside the building is huge. You walk down a long corridor and one hundred and thirty metres inside a mountain. At the end, there are three large areas with seeds. 

There are about half a million varieties of seeds inside the vault. For example, there are varieties of seed for rice from Asia and Africa, 32 varieties of seed for potatoes from Ireland and seeds for different chillies from the USA. 

The seed vault has space for a lot more seeds. In total, you can put about 2.2 billion seeds inside. The seeds can live here for thousands of years because of the cold temperature of -18°C. So, in the future, humans can grow any seed they want. In other words, the seed vault is the difference between life and death.