Sort of like a giant time capsule for plants, the Global Seed Vault in Norway officially opened for business on February 26, 2008. The seed vault will ultimately house and preserve the seeds from hundreds of thousands of plants (at the moment the count is around 730,000). The purpose is to "store duplicates of seeds from collections around the globe. If seeds are lost for any reason--natural disasters, war or power failure--the seed collections could be reestablished using seeds from [the seed vault]."The seed vault is built into a mountainside in Svalbard (a group of islands in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Norway) and looks for all the world like something straight out of a Sean Connery-era Bond movie.
To read more about the efforts of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, check out the Global Seed Vault website.
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