Constructed in an abandoned coal mine, the huge facility on the remote Arctic island of Svalbard is designed to safeguard up to 4.5 million types of plant from across the globe.
Dubbed the ’Noah’s Ark’ of food crops, the Global Seed Vault is already home to more than one million varieties which would be made available to governments following a global crisis such as nuclear war or climate change.
The facility has accumulated its impressive stockpile since opening in 2008, including thousands of seeds used as staples such as rice, wheat and potato.
The multi-million-pound upgrade will see the construction of a new access tunnel as well as a new service building to house emergency power and refrigeration units.
Announcing the revamp this week, Jon Georg Dale, Norway’s minister of agriculture and food, said: “It is a great and important task to safeguard all the genetic material that is crucial to global food security.”
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Seeds are kept in one of the facility’s three storage rooms and are stored in heat-proof packaging to protect them from sub-zero Arctic temperatures before being locked behind metal cages.
The vault was constructed under the thick Arctic permafrost to provide a fail-safe cooling system in case there is no electricity to run the powered chillers.
But the facility came close to disaster last year when the permafrost started to melt, causing water to seep into the mine.
The liquid froze before it could get close to damaging any of the seeds, but the upgrade work will help guard against a similar incident.
The vault has already been used to create new gene banks in Morocco and Lebanon after the region’s central seed bank in war-torn Aleppo was destroyed in the Syrian Civil War.
Researchers in the Middle East requested seeds from the Norwegian vault in 2015 to replenish those which were lost.
The crops have since been regrown in their original habitat and samples were returned to the Global Seed Bank in 2017.
Svalbard is located between Norway and the North Pole and is home to the northernmost settlement with a permanent civilian population.
As well as the seed vault, the World Data Archive is also located on the Arctic island.
The doomsday data centre is slowly being filled with digital copies of historic documents.