The Seed Vault is an underground facility, opened in 2008, that houses more than 930,000 samples of seeds from around the world. It serves as a global backup for individual countries’ seed banks. To ...

Two-thirds of the world’s food comes today from just nine plants: sugar cane, maize (corn), rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, oil-palm fruit, sugar beet and cassava. In the past, farmers grew tens of ...

Among genebanks, there is something called the black box system, where you can send seed duplicates to another genebank for ...

Deep inside the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, a concrete wedge in the permafrost holds a backup copy of the world’s food ...

Humanity’s last hope to feed our future may lie dormant in a once-abandoned Arctic coal mine on a remote island in Norway. The “doomsday seed vault,” as it’s colloquially known, was built a decade ago ...

Today, seed banks around the world are doing much of the work of saving crop varieties that could be essential resources under future growing conditions. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway ...

The 2,100-person town of Longyearbyen endures four months of perpetual darkness in the winter, followed by four months of sunlight in the summer. The area boasts more polar bears than people and a ...

In the seven years since the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened, hundreds of thousands of seed samples have gone into its icy tombs. And not one has come out—until now. This week the International ...

HELSINKI — Nearly 10 years after a “doomsday” seed vault opened on an Arctic island, some 50,000 new samples from seed collections around the world have been deposited in the world’s largest ...

The seed bank designed to preserve the world’s crops and plants in the event of global disaster isn’t prepared to withstand the greatest global disaster facing our planet: global warming. Melting ...