Scientists are racing to protect the world’s seeds from natural disasters and war. But what happens when those disasters come ...

Three times a year, a fortress within the remote mountainside of a Norwegian island opens its doors to a select few. Such infrequency is intentional. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault preserves more than ...

On a remote Arctic island, scientists have swung open the doors of the world’s largest so called doomsday vault and offered a ...

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 ...

Deep beneath an icy Norwegian mountain above the Arctic Circle lies the largest concentration of agricultural diversity on Earth. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, also known as the "Doomsday" vault or ...

This was the moment of truth. We’d spent countless hours meticulously sterilizing seeds (1,710, to be specific), filling the lab with a cacophony of rattling as we shook them in bleach. We’d built a ...

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault has received a major a new deposit of seeds from several hundred plant species. In a formal ceremony on February 25, 2020, hosted by the Norwegian Prime Minister Erna ...

If you ever visit Spitsbergen, Norway, one of the islands of Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Circle, you might come across coal mines, snowmobile traffic, glaciers, polar bears and reindeer. Or a ...

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 ...