Seeds of salvation

Updated

Enter the Arctic Doomsday Vault, a final safeguard for the world's biodiversity.

Europe correspondent Barbara Miller with photography by Cameron Bauer

At the very edge of civilisation, on a rugged island north of Norway, sits a strange, jutting building that houses the most important collection of seeds in the world, stored away in the event of catastrophe.

The doors of what is known as the Doomsday Vault opened again recently on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, as new seeds were delivered from the US and Japan.

The Global Seed Vault, set up in 2008, houses hundreds of thousands of crop seed varieties from around the world. Svalbard was chosen to host the vault because of its cold climate and remote location.

The ends of the earth

It's Bente Navaerdal's job to check on the vault.

When she first came to Svalbard, she thought she would stay just three years, but it didn't take long before the remote Arctic archipelago had a hold on her.

"I felt it the moment I landed at the airport, 'Yeah, this is my place on Earth'," she says.

An engineer, she is now into her fourth year on Svalbard and has no intention of leaving anytime soon.

"I hope that in three, four, five years I can feel like, 'OK, now I am finished with Svalbard and I can go back [to the mainland]', but I'm not sure," she says. "I'm really not sure."

It's an extreme place, as close to the North Pole as it is to mainland Norway, a land of 24-hour darkness in winter and midnight sun in summer.

"Either you come up here and you love it, or you think, 'Oh this was strange', and you move back down again."

Bente is a manager with the Norwegian Government property agency Statsbyg, and regularly checks on one of the world's most intriguing buildings.

"Every time I walk down there I get this kind of wow feeling about what's inside there, and what we are looking after on behalf of the world," she says.

A final failsafe

Since the vault opened, 865,000 seed varieties have been deposited, among them wheat, barley, potatoes and almost 150,000 varieties of rice.

The idea underpinning the venture is that here deep in the Norwegian permafrost you have back-up copies of seed varieties from around the world - a safety duplicate of the ones held in smaller national or regional seed banks which are more vulnerable to natural disaster, conflict, or in some cases simply mismanagement.

The vault scientists say preserving the world's seeds is key to ensuring crop diversity and food security in the face of climatic and political instability.

Only the very tip of the building is visible; a sliver of concrete and steel jutting out into the Arctic snow on a hillside just out of town.

It is made strangely beautiful by the shimmering greens and silvers of the artwork above the doorway and stretching along the top of the building - Perpetual Repercussion by Norwegian Dyveke Sanne.

While Longyearbyen's residents are proud to host this unique international collection, Bente is one of a relatively small number of residents to have seen inside the vault.

Foreign dignitaries, scientists and media crews can go in when invited, but it is not open to those just wanting to have a look.

To get from the front door to the vault room you have to walk 130 metres, deep into the permafrost.

As you go further into the mountain the temperature plunges, the seeds inside essentially frozen in time.

Almost every country in the world is represented in the vault.

In the back corner of the freezing storage room, there is a little piece of Australia - a stack of bright blue boxes containing 11,000 seeds, the majority of them deposited in 2014 by the Australian Grains Genebank and the Australian Pastures Genebank.

More deposits of Australian seeds are planned for next year.

Beyond politics

Next to the Australian boxes sits the Austrian collection, and close by collections from a host of countries, including Russia, Ukraine, India, Mexico, Uzbekistan, Germany and Peru.

This truly is a global project, and nothing underlines that more than the presence of two cherry red wooden boxes from North Korea.

The Croptrust, which funds and runs the vault in conjunction with the Norwegian Government, sees this as evidence that here deep in the Norwegian permafrost seed safety takes precedence over politics.

Bente's job involves checking that the vault remains at a steady -18 Celsius. If a computer in her office indicates a slight fluctuation she immediately sends in one of her technical people to check it out.

Her screens will also register any intruders, not that it's likely.

"That has never happened," she says. "I can't imagine anyone wants to try to break into the vault, because no-one breaks into anything up here on Svalbard. We don't have that type of crime up there."

That is not entirely true. There are break-ins at cabins now and then. The usual suspects in those cases are polar bears, foraging for food.

"Yeah, the bears are the ones who most often break in," Bente says. "But I think the bear will struggle up in the vault because it's concrete and steel, so I don't think the bear will get in there."

A long way from home

The seeds in the vault aren't the only Australian connection to Svalbard.

"Are the shooters ready? When you are ready, four shots, fire!" bellows Frede Lamo, a safety instructor at the University in Svalbard.

There is on this occasion actually only one shooter, 31-year-old Peita Houlihan from Brisbane, who takes aim at bulls-eye targets at the foot of a snow-clad mountain 30 metres away.

Bears are on Peita's mind - she is doing a refresher on the mandatory gun training she received when she arrived on Svalbard at the beginning of this year for a six-month stint, an elective in her Marine Biology degree at the University of Queensland.

All newcomers to Svalbard have to learn how to use a rifle, if they ever want to leave town that is.

On either end of the road out of Longyearbyen, the world's most northern town, there is a sign warning of the possibility of an encounter with a polar bear.

"It's so far removed from what I am used to. A lot of other people can be quite scared though," she says

"To actually take a rifle home, [some] people put their hand up and said, 'No I don't want to do this', whereas for me I just think why not, it's exciting, it's something different and I'm not going to be able to do that at home."

Frede Lamo says it is rare that anyone has to shoot a polar bear. In fact you are required first of all, if you can keep your wits about you, to try and scare the bear.

He says he has scared away dozens of bears, by firing flare guns and by shouting at them. He estimates he has had about 40 or 50 such encounters.

"That's one of my best moments on Svalbard. When I can see this polar bear coming up a little bit closer, can have a good look at it, look how it behaves in the natural environment, especially out on the ice," he said.

"So I have never been afraid of polar bears when I met them, I have a respect for them."

The closest Frede Lamo has ever been to a bear was 2-3 metres, when he was out hiking and came across one sleeping.

"It was laying behind the rock, and I was passing, and he looked at me and I looked at him, and then he ran in that direction and I started to walk in that direction (away from the bear)," he says smiling.

The land of extremes

Peita hasn't had a bear encounter yet, and says if she ever was forced to shoot one she would cry because she would be so sad, but she says she has other worries about life in the Arctic.

"I'm a little more concerned about other dangers," she says. "There's avalanches, crevasses, possibly even falling into sea ice."

As a new student Peita has also received training for those scenarios too.

The toughest was the sea ice training.

"So they cut a big hole in this ice, put us in our snowmobile suits and let us jump in and we had to swim to the other side, and try and get ourselves out," she said.

Despite the cold and the dangers she is loving her time here.

"There's not too much to not like about it," she says. "When it snows it's beautiful, when the sun's out it's beautiful."

It took a while to get used to the 24-hour darkness when she arrived in the depths of the Arctic winter, but Peita says that too was exciting because it was so different.

The next challenge will be the 24-hour sunlight that will take hold by the end of April.

One task Peita has not managed to master is the local language.

"Terrible, terrible," she laughs, shaking her head, when I ask how her Norwegian is. "I can say hello and goodbye, but that's about it."

Learning the lingo is hard in a place where almost everyone seems to speak almost perfect English.

A wild life

As well as polar bears, the 2,000 residents of the world's most northern town also share this land with Arctic foxes and reindeer.

Each resident with a permit is allowed to hunt one reindeer per year.

Bente Navaerdal did the training when she first came to Svalbard with her son Erland, who at 14 was just old enough to get a hunting license himself.

"I thought why not do a mother-son thing," she says.

Three years on she's a keen hunter and has shot several reindeer.

"That is really amazing being able to shoot it of course, but making your own dinner from the reindeer you have shot yourself, that is just fantastic," she says.

"It's a fantastic meat. The reindeer up here has a really wonderful taste compared to the reindeers down on the mainland."

In Longyearbyen, there are plenty of other ways to pass the long days and nights.

When she is not hunting reindeer, in her spare time Bente sings in a choir, plays saxophone in a big band, is an elected member of the town council, and goes snowmobiling and hiking.

"It's never boring here," she says. "I think this must be the most special place on Earth."

Peita Houlihan is two months into her six months on Svalbard and already realizing she will miss this unique part of the world when she has to leave.

"Sometimes you wake up and you wish it was warm or the sun was higher or something like that," she says, but being here "only six months out of a whole lifetime … is really special."

Credits

Reporter: Barbara Miller

Barbara Miller Photographer: Cameron Bauer

Topics: botanical-science, science-and-technology

First posted