A vault built into the side of a mountain in a remote Arctic island in Norway holds seeds that are key to protecting the world’s genetic crop diversity.

1. Norway built the $9-million (U.S.) Svalbard Global Seed Vault in 2008 to hold backup copies of seeds from gene banks around the world. The idea was sparked after researchers at Canada’s gene bank, as well as the board of an international research group, wrote to Norway. And as a member of NordGen, which operates a gene bank for the Nordic countries, Norway already had a small container of seeds in an abandoned coal mine in Svalbard, installed in 1984 to test the viability of storage in permafrost at -4 C.

2. The global seed bank is on Spitsbergen Island in the Svalbard archipelago, a three-hour flight from Oslo and just outside a small town called Longyearbyen. “It’s fascinating to fly to Svalbard,” says Grethe Helene Evjen, a senior adviser at the Norwegian agriculture and food ministry, who has been to the island many times. “If you go there in wintertime at one point you just go into the dark … It’s like you go into a black wall.” In summer, Svalbard is home to the midnight sun.

3. The entrance and top of the vault are decorated with an award-winning sculpture by Dyveke Sanne called Perpetual Repercussion Evjen says the artwork has hundreds of pieces of crystal, polished steel and LED lights, which the artist installed herself while working in temperatures of -20 C accompanied by bitter winds. The sculpture is beautiful, says Evjen. “It sparkles when it’s dark. And even in the midnight sun you can see it.”

4. Seed deposits are co-ordinated by a NordGen employee. Seeds are dried and packaged in aluminum envelopes and stored in boxes made of cardboard, plastic or sometimes — as with the seeds sent by North Korea — wood. The boxes arrive by air and are transported to the vault by van, where they are unloaded manually onto a cart. “It’s not very sophisticated,” says Evjen.

5. A 100-metre tunnel leads to the vaults. Evjen says it’s exciting to step inside Svalbard. “It’s a very positive place. It’s a global place. You feel that you have the whole world community when you see all the seeds there ... And still you are in this very remote place on earth. It’s very special.”

6. Three sets of grey steel doors open on to the vaults, which are each 10 metres wide by 30 metres long. The middle vault is the only one in use but is nearly full. Inside, boxes are stored on metal shelves and the air is cooled to -18 C, which ensures the longevity of the seeds. The other two vaults are empty. Currently, Svalbard holds 930,000 unique varieties of seeds, which are really meant as the ultimate backup because countries typically have copies already stored in another gene bank.

7. The only withdrawal made so far was in 2015 by the International Centre for Agriculture Research in Dry Areas, which operates a gene bank in war-torn Aleppo, Syria. The organization (which owns the boxes in the photo) removed the seeds to duplicate them and replenish gene banks in Lebanon and Morocco. In February, the organization sent seeds to Svalbard to replace the ones they withdrew. Surprisingly, the Syrian seed bank still exists but is an area still held by rebels. Staff haven’t been able to access it for eight months, although they have been receiving information on the supply of electricity to the storage rooms, says Ahmed Amri, who is with ICARDA.

8. Canada was one of the first countries to contribute to Svalbard in 2008, and in May, we will send another round of seeds, ones that have been grown since the country last deposited seeds in 2013. Canada’s gene bank, in Saskatoon, grows its own crops like flax to replenish its stock. The seeds are typically not the modern ones used in agriculture but are preserved for breeding and research and to ensure they’re not lost. Some seeds date back thousands of years. More than a third of the Saskatoon collection is barley — 40,000 different samples — because Canada stores the world’s collection.