The Norwegian government is planning to allocate 100 million kroner ($13 million) in technical improvements to enhance a doomsday seed vault situated on an Arctic island, built nearly a decade ago to protect the world’s food supplies from an apocalypse, a government press release said Friday.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a secure seed bank buried deep inside a mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen near Longyearbyen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago. The underground bunker is a long-term seed storage facility, built to keep its three vaults cool for 200-years — and can survive natural or human-made disasters.

The doomsday vault serves as a storage facility for more than 850,000 seed samples, according to the Public Radio Institute, which the three vault rooms are cooled to -18 °C (-3 °F).

Cary Fowler, the founder of Svalbard Global Seed Vault, calls the facility, “the backup insurance policy for all the seed banks around the world.”

“The idea is that we want to provide fail-safe protection for the diversity of our agricultural crops, diversity that is stored in the form of seeds,” Fowler says.

“You need freezing temperatures to conserve seeds long term. So we went close to the north pole, where it’s very cold, and we built a facility inside of a mountain, which makes it also very secure. There we’re storing backup copies — seed samples of, currently, more than 850,000 different crop varieties,” he added.

Norway’s Minister of Agriculture and Food Jon Georg Dale said, “the upgrades, which we hope to begin presently, will ensure that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault can continue to offer the world’s gene banks a secure storage space in the future. It is a great and important task to safeguard all the genetic material that is crucial to global food security.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…