Humus

EssayPlants4 min read

Seeds in the Freezer

Inside a mountain on Svalbard lie more than a million seed samples. It isn’t a vault for the end of the world, but a backup for its ordinary days.

By Hanna Sitowie

The concrete entrance of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in winter light, with the fjord and mountains behind

A seed is a letter sent to the future. It contains everything a plant needs to start over, and a store of food for the first few days. It only needs someone to open it at the right moment: with moisture, warmth, light.

For ten thousand years farmers kept these letters in clay jars, sacks and larders, choosing the best grains each year for the next sowing. That is how thousands of varieties came about, each suited to its own valley and microclimate. Most of them disappeared within a single century.

Dandelion, pumpkin and hibiscus seeds. Each solves the same problem in its own way.3 photos

The people who didn’t eat the collection

A short history of seed banks

  1. 1894

    The Bureau of Applied Botany is founded in St Petersburg. It will grow into Nikolai Vavilov’s institute and the world’s first great seed bank.

  2. 1941–1944

    During the siege of Leningrad, the institute’s staff guard the collection from a starving city. Several of them die of hunger among sacks of rice and wheat they never touched.

  3. 2008

    The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opens, carved 120 metres into a mountain, in the permafrost.

  4. 2015

    The first withdrawal ever: Syria’s seed bank in Aleppo, destroyed by war, rebuilds its collection from the backup.

The story of the Leningrad botanists is so unlikely it sounds like a legend, but it is well documented. They sat among tonnes of food and starved, because they understood it wasn’t food. It was future harvests.

The concrete entrance of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in winter light, with the fjord and mountains behind
The entrance of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Most of the building is hidden inside the mountain.Photo: Michael Major for Crop Trust / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

A backup

The Svalbard vault is often called the doomsday vault. That is misleading. It isn’t about the apocalypse, but about ordinary disasters: a lab fire, a flood, a war, a power cut, a clerical error. Each country keeps a duplicate of its seeds here, and the originals stay at home. Svalbard doesn’t own them; it only looks after them.

4.5 million
samples the vault can hold
−18 °C
the storage temperature
over 1.3 million
samples deposited so far
Source: Crop Trust
The seed vault entrance at night, lit up in the snow
The entrance at night, during the polar winter.Photo: Dag Endresen / Wikimedia Commons, Attribution

At minus eighteen degrees, the seeds of most crops stay viable for decades, some for centuries. If the cooling ever failed, the permafrost around the vault would still keep it below zero.

A small bank in a drawer

You don’t need a mountain to keep seeds. A paper envelope, a date and a name will do. Save seeds from the vegetables that grew well for you, swap them with your neighbours, sow a few every year. Every drawer of envelopes is a letter to the future, too.