NORWAY:A "DOOMSDAY" vault built to withstand an earthquake or nuclear strike is ready to open deep in the permafrost of an Arctic mountain where it will protect millions of seeds from man-made and natural disasters.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault will officially be inaugurated today, less than a year after crews started drilling in Norway's Svalbard archipelago, about 1,000km (620 miles) from the North Pole and about 480km (300 miles) north of the Norwegian mainland.
The vault, which Norway built at a cost of about €6.2 million (about $9.1 million), can store 4.5 million seed samples from around the globe, shielding them from climate change, wars, natural disasters and other threats.
The vault is designed to be a "fail-safe backup" for the other 1,400 seed banks in the world in case they are hit by disasters. War wiped out seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan and one in the Philippines was flooded in the wake of a typhoon in 2006.
Norway owns the vault but countries sending seeds will own the material they deposit.
- (AP)