![]() ![]() The 116,000 samples contained in the boxes include wheat, barley and grasses adapted to dry environments, which ICARDA hopes to plant and harvest by fall, before returning new seeds to the vault. This is the basis for ICARDA withdrawing roughly 130 out of 325 boxes it had previously deposited in the vault, to replace the seeds in the gene bank in the Syrian city of Aleppo that has been damaged by the raging war. Not merely a frozen time capsule, any institution that deposits seeds can request them back again at any point in time in the event that their own collection is damaged or lost. It acts as an insurance for the nearly 2,000 seed banks that exist throughout the world, with each one sending samples from their own collection for safe storage. The vault contains seeds from almost every country in the world, and currently holds around 860,000 samples of the most important agricultural crops, though it has the capacity to store a staggering 4.5 million varieties. Octopi, Octopodes Or Octopuses? What's The Correct Plural For Octopus? Though the countries that send seeds to the Vault still own them and are the only entities permitted to withdraw the seeds, a requisite for deposit is that all. The 'Doomsday Vault' just got its first bit of doomsday press: coverage of its first-ever withdrawal of seeds. “Protecting the world's biodiversity in this manner is precisely the purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault,” Brian Lainoff, a spokesman for the Crop Trust, which runs the doomsday vault in conjunction with the Norwegian government, told Reuters. ![]() The continuing conflict in the Middle East has spurred the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), which manages what remains of the Syrian seed bank, to request the first ever withdrawal of seeds from the “doomsday” vault. This backup has finally been called upon, as the ongoing civil war in Syria has done serious damage to the region's vital reserve of local crops. ![]() Designed to withstand the effects of any man-made or natural disaster, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault keeps stashes of native crop seeds from almost every nation as a backup in case a country's own collection deteriorates or worse. Dug into a remote mountainside deep in the Arctic Circle is one of the most important biological collections in the world. ![]()
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