'Doomsday' vault that could save mankind from extinction given £9m upgrade

[RoterTeufel]

'Doomsday' vault that could save mankind from extinction given £9m upgrade

A DOOMSDAY vault built to save humanity should a nuclear war break out will receive a massive upgrade.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault – meant to prepare the human race for oblivion – is buried 130 metres inside a mountain in the Arctic Circle between Norway and the North Pole.

It boasts five doors with coded locks and combinations known only by a few people.

To further ensure security, the vault is unlocked for deposits only three or four times a year.

Norway is now spending 100 million kroner (£9 million) to upgrade the vault after 10 years of use.

The revamp would cover "construction of a new, concrete-built access tunnel, as well as a service building to house emergency power and refrigerating units and other electrical equipment that emits heat through the tunnel," the Agriculture Ministry said in a statement.

A vital batch of seeds, set to provide a food supply post-apocalyptic war, will also be delivered to the underground concrete bunker.

The vault holds nearly a million different varieties of crop seeds including potato, beans, rice and wheat from almost every country around the world.

The upgrades “will ensure that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault can continue to offer the world’s gene banks a secure storage space in the future", Norway’s Minister of Agriculture and Food Jon Georg Dale said.

“It is a great and important task to safeguard all the genetic material that is crucial to global food security," he added.

Svalbard was opened in 2008 with the aim of providing a “fail-safe seed storage facility, built to stand the test of time and the challenge of natural or man-made disasters”.

An unexpected thaw of permafrost meant some water flowed into the entrance of the tunnel to the vault in late 2016.

In 2015, researchers made a first withdrawal from the vault after Syria's civil war damaged a seed bank near the city of Aleppo.

The seeds were grown and re-deposited at the Svalbard vault a year later.

The upgrade to the building's supplies comes as North Korea and the US continue to spark fears of a “nuclear apocalypse”

Daily Star Sunday