There is a rumour that it is illegal to die in Longyearbyen, an intriguing law for any town, much less one located in a part of the world where polar bears outnumber people. Longyearbyen sits at the edge of an icy, mountainous fjord in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, which is itself well within the Arctic Circle and little more than 1000 kilometres shy of the North Pole. There are no towns further north than Longyearbyen, not anywhere in the world. It is, as one might expect, a cold and isolated place. Every year in the final days of October, the sun’s disc sinks below the horizon and does not rise again – not even a little – until mid-February. The formal name for this is the polar night, but on Svalbard they call it mørketiden, the time of darkness. Svalbard is, by all accounts, a wild and raw place, and brutal. But, they say, it is also beautiful – eerily so in the depths of mørketiden when the aurora borealis dances in the sky.
It is unsurprising to learn that life on Svalbard can be challenging. There are avalanches to be wary of and, more often, the pernicious creep of frostbite, and one must be ever watchful for those polar bears – it’s said that a wise person does not venture from town without a rifle, and preferably a flare gun, too. But despite the many ways one could meet one’s end on Svalbard, the truth of the matter is that it is not illegal to die there. It is simply illegal to be buried. A deep layer of permafrost – permanently frozen ground – permeates the archipelago. Not so long ago, locals discovered that it prevents buried bodies from decomposing, and with this came the realisation that graveyards could act as reservoirs of well-preserved pathogens, a particularly unsettling thought given that the Longyearbyen cemetery contains the graves of eleven people who died from Spanish flu in 1918. It’s not easy to spook the kind of people who choose to live at the end of the world, but this did. It was agreed that burials were a mistake best not repeated.
No trees grow on Svalbard, as they simply cannot take root in the permafrost. What little that does grow there is small and scraggly, and is often covered in snow. But this wasn’t always the case. Once upon a time, around 380 million years ago, Svalbard sat at the equator and was covered in some of Earth’s very first forests. Svalbard’s fossils tell a story of lycopods – giant, vascular club mosses reaching up to 4 metres in height – growing in dense clusters. They grew and decayed, then grew and decayed some more. On and on this went, as they captured atmospheric CO2 for millions of years. The layers of these forests accumulated, compacted and, as Svalbard fractured and drifted ever north, they turned into coal.
By the 1980s, Longyearbyen had been a coalmining town for many years. Visitors weren’t all that common in Svalbard then, and crop scientists were an even rarer species. So what came to pass on 14 November 1984 was unusual indeed. On that day, in the early darkness of mørketiden, a team of crop scientists from the Nordic Genebank in Sweden arrived. Accompanied by employees from the local mining company, they drove 3 kilometres west of town until they reached the north side of Platåfjellet, one of the enormous mountains that loom over Longyearbyen, a behemoth of sandstone, coal seams, claystone and permafrost. Carrying several wooden crates, the team made their way up the slope to Coal Mine No. 3. They ventured 200 metres into the shaft, until they reached a narrow transverse passage that had once enabled miners to move from one shaft to another. Once there, the wooden crates were placed in a steel shipping container which was then sealed shut. Temperature readings were taken: the air temp was −3.6°C, the rock surface temperature −3.7°C, courtesy of their location deep within the mountain’s permafrost layer. This was the entire point of the exercise. The scientists needed those boxes to remain cold for as long as possible: decades at least, maybe even centuries, without the need for electricity. For them, Platåfjellet was now effectively an enormous off-grid refrigeration unit. And those boxes? They contained seeds.
Specifically, those seeds were duplicates of the crop seed collection back in Sweden. The idea was that each of the seeds stored here would serve as a kind of organic backup file should anything happen to the primary collection. The experiment in Coal Mine No. 3 would ultimately inspire the creation of a purpose-built facility that would back up not just the Nordic Genebank’s seed collection but those of the world’s crop genebanks. It was decided that this facility would be located in the cold heart of Platåfjellet, too, but it would not be a coalmine retrofit. This would be built in virgin rock. And so it was, in June 2006, that construction of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault began.
*
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault comprises three chambers, each roughly 27 metres long by 10 metres wide and 6 metres high, and accessed by a 120-metre-long cylindrical tunnel which is connected to the outside world via a singular entryway, an angular protrusion of reinforced concrete that rises out of the northern slope of Platåfjellet. Those chambers are artificially cooled to a temperature of −18°C, enabled by a local electricity source backed up with generators. That said, Platåfjellet’s permafrost provides quite a lot of refrigerative oomph in bringing the whole facility to well below zero, with the artificial system taking it the rest of the way. The permafrost then serves as further backup should the electricity and the generators both fail. Given that the entire facility is designed to last more than 1000 years, that’s not beyond the realm of possibility.
Each chamber can store 1.5 million seed samples, meaning the vault has room for 4.5 million samples in total. It’s worth noting that these samples – or ‘accessions’, as genebanks prefer to call them – are sealed, water-tight aluminium packets that each store up to 500 seeds. Some quick back-of-the-envelope maths reveals that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault could theoretically store over two billion seeds.
The primary objective of the seed vault is to serve as a fail-safe for global food security. Specifically, it functions as a backup storage centre for the world’s crop seeds and crop wild relatives by storing duplicates of the seed collections in each of the crop genebanks. While the facility was being constructed, a number of crop genebanks set to work preparing duplicates of their own seed accessions. When the vault officially opened on 28 February 2008, the event was marked by the deposit of 320,000 seed accessions from all over the world.
Åsmund Asdal is the Seed Vault coordinator at NordGen, an organisation formed in the lead-up to this event. He is in charge of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault’s operations. He explains that the vault serves exclusively as a storage facility. ‘We do not do anything with the seeds in the vault,’ Asdal tells me. ‘We don’t have any labs and we never open the sealed boxes [that contain] seeds received from depositing genebanks.’ Although NordGen is responsible for the vault’s operation, any seeds deposited in it remain under the ownership of the contributing genebank – only they can withdraw their seeds, if and when the times comes. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault itself is unstaffed and only opens its doors three times a year for scheduled deposits, or if special circumstances require it. Otherwise, there it sits, sealed and quiet. Conditions inside the vault are monitored remotely by a Norwegian government agency, which also provides year-round security; Svalbard’s polar bears provide additional security entirely free of charge.
As one might expect, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was welcomed with open arms by the world’s genebanks. Asdal tells me there are now over 1.1 million accessions from eighty-nine genebanks around the world. The species represented include wheat, rice, barley, sorghum, maize, soybean, chickpeas, rye, oats, numerous bean species, peanuts, alfalfa and many more, not to mention many crop wild relatives. However, says Asdal, it’s not an even distribution of species. ‘Some species are represented by just one or two seed samples in the seed vault,’ he says. ‘While [for] wheat, for instance, [we] have more than 200,000 samples in the seed vault.’
Indeed, Asdal is concerned that there are a number of what he calls ‘globally underutilised crops’ which are not well represented in the vault, highlighting the need to continue collecting and storing many more species. Svalbard has room for them, he says. They have only just filled the first of the three storage chambers inside the mountain and are now beginning to store seeds in the second. ‘The estimation is that we can store 4.5 million seed samples in the vault as it is now, but if this is filled up, we will dig out one or two more chambers, but that will not happen in our time,’ he says. ‘At the moment the FAO estimates that there are around 2.2 million unique seed samples in the world’s genebanks all together … The space in the seed vault could store double this but we expect that the number of samples in the seed genebanks will increase due to breeding programs, research programs, collecting of more varieties from farmers in remote places, and also collecting seeds from crop wild relatives in nature. But there is plenty of space.’
The catch is that any seeds stored in Svalbard must be ‘orthodox’ seeds, which are those that can tolerate the drying and freezing process. Many of the world’s major crops – like cereals and legumes – produce orthodox seeds, but there are many tropical crop plants that do not. In a way this makes sense: those plants evolved in warm temperatures and high-moisture environments, so it stands to reason their seeds would not take well to drying and freezing. Such non-orthodox seeds are referred to, unflatteringly, as ‘recalcitrant’, and there are genebanks dedicated to studying and preserving them, but these seeds never make it to Svalbard.
It is a strange thing to build something one hopes to never need, but that is precisely what the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is: an unsettling manifestation of the adage ‘hope for the best but prepare for the worst’. A key feature of the latter is that the vault sits not at the base of Platåfjellet but a good way up, around 130 metres above sea level. This currently affords the entrance a sweeping view of the fjord and its cold, dark water, and also situates the vault well above the predicted worst-case scenario sea-level rise of more than 70 metres, should both the arctic and Greenland ice sheets melt.
That’s not as far-fetched an idea as one might think. As of 2021, late summer ice cover in the Arctic encompassed an area of 4.72 million square kilometres. It is a staggeringly enormous reservoir of fresh water, one that is already melting to such an extent that it is decreasing at a rate of 13 per cent per decade. This is because the Arctic region is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world, and even Svalbard is quite literally feeling the heat. According to scientists at the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, sometime during the mid-1980s, the glaciers on Svalbard lost most of their ‘firn’, a protective buffer of porous compressed snow, and now glacial melting outpaces snowfall. As the archipelago becomes warmer, the permafrost is becoming, well, less frosty and less permanent. This has already posed problems for the seed vault. Its construction back in the mid-2000s necessitated rock excavation and therefore disturbance of the very permafrost that made the location desirable. A protective layer of permafrost had not yet fully re-established itself when Svalbard experienced warm temperatures and heavy rainfall in 2016, and water began to seep into the access tunnel. Mercifully, that was as far as it got. The chambers remained sealed and dry, but it left the operators rattled. The event triggered a series of urgent improvements, from further waterproofing of the tunnel to the digging of drainage ditches to make sure it would never happen again.
*
The entrance to the Svalbard vault is adorned with a luminous installation by Norwegian artist Dyveke Sanne. Titled Perpetual Repercussion, it’s a hypnotic cluster of prisms, mirrors and fibre-optics that reflects sunlight in the polar summer, and during the polar night it glows with white and iridescent turquoise lights reminiscent of the aurora borealis above. Washington Post columnist Adrian Higgins once called it ‘Bauhaus meets Valhalla’, and indeed, it has become emblematic. But it is more than just beautiful. Its theme is reflection, because that is what Svalbard is meant to be – a mirror of genebank collections, but also a looking glass into which we cannot help but see the true fragility of food systems already fractured by disasters, including those of our own making.