Doomsday Arctic seed vault gets deposit of 30,000 new samples

An Arctic seed vault on Norway's Spitsbergen island has received new samples from the largest number of depositors since 2020, reflecting fear about the threat of conflict and climate change to food security, a custodian of the facility said on Wednesday. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, set deep inside a mountain to withstand disasters from nuclear war to global warming, was launched in 2008 as a backup for the world's gene banks that store the genetic code for thousands of plant species. Billed as a doomsday vault protected by permafrost, the deposit has received samples from across the world, and played a leading role between 2015 and 2019 in rebuilding seed collections damaged during the war in Syria.