February 14, 2018

Svalbard and the Global Seed Vault

Svalbard, located in the Arctic Ocean between Norway and the North Pole is a fascinating place to visit.

Last week, I traveled to Svalbard - it’s about as close to the North Pole as one can go by airplane. Although it is rich in nature and wildlife, it is also very remote and quite peaceful. My brief visit focused on an exclusive trip to the Global Seed Vault located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen near Longyearbyen. The Seed Vault is a long-term seed storage facility, built to withstand natural or man-made disasters. Maintained by the Norwegian government, the Crop Trust and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, the Seed Vault has the capacity to store more than four-million varieties of crops and represents the world’s largest collection of crop diversity - a natural resource we must save forever. By the year 2020, Crop Trust hopes to build an endowment fund of 850-million dollars to ensure all unique crop collections in international gene banks can be conserved.

Here are more photos from Oslo, and my journey to Svalbard and the Global Seed Vault - enjoy.