I will explain the radio silence from the past week shortly (or, as soon as I am officially allowed — it is $$good$$ news!), but right now I’m watching a 60 Minutes story about the Doomsday vault, a super cold storage vault for storage of seeds. Yes, seeds!

The Svalbard International Seed Vault was built by the Norwegian government into a mountainside on the Svalbard islands (just inside the North Pole) at a cost of $5m. Intended to preserve the planet’s crop diversity in perpetuity and “from future catastrophes, such as nuclear war, asteroid strikes and climate change.” (The 60 Minutes story reports that a seed vault in Afghanistan was pillaged for … not the seeds, but for the glass containers in which the seeds were stored).

This BBC report reveals that the seeds will be stored at -18C and that the surrounding permafrost will help keep the seeds at the appropriate temperature. Once the seeds are safely stored in the vault, humans won’t be needed to tend the seed bank. “If you design a facility to be used in worst-case scenarios, then you cannot actually have too much dependency on human beings” BBC quotes Cary Fowler, the Trust’s executive director.  Interesting!