IT SOUNDS like something out of a movie: in the furthest reaches of the Arctic – about 1000 kilometres from the North Pole – is a vault buried 150 metres below the permafrost. Inside, with a combination that no single person knows in its entirety, is a storage locker that may one day save the world, or a large part of it.
Late last month the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in Longyearbyen, on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. The facility is nothing less than a Noah’s ark of plants for the 21st century, aiming to preserve the world’s crop…
