By Mari Hansen 
The speed at which the world’s nations are currently planting seeds in a frozen mountain above the Arctic Circle is subtly unsettling. In the most recent deposit, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault received over 30,000 new seed samples from 23 depositors in 21 different countries. This is the highest number of depositors since a record-breaking round in 2020. Bangladesh, Bolivia, Chad, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, and Suriname were the six nations that contributed for the first time.
These are not affluent research giants with extra funds for international insurance programs. Despite these countries’ struggles with conflict, drought, flooding, and persistent hunger, they felt compelled to ship their seeds to Norway. It’s worth pausing to consider that detail.
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Name | Svalbard Global Seed Vault |
| Location | Svalbard, Norway — approximately halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole |
| Established | 2008 |
| Managed By | Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food, the Crop Trust, and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen) |
| Storage Capacity | Over 1.3 million seed samples (4.5 million potential capacity) |
| Storage Conditions | −18°C, 130 meters inside a mountain |
| Number of Species | More than 5,000 plant species |
| Current Depositors | Gene banks, governments, universities, and research institutions from every continent |
| Executive Director (Crop Trust) | Stefan Schmitz |
| Vault Coordinator (NordGen) | Åsmund Asdal |
| Official Website | www.croptrust.org/work/svalbard-global-seed-vault |
Located 130 meters deep inside a mountain on a remote Arctic archipelago, the Global Seed Vault is maintained at a steady −18 degrees Celsius. Designed to withstand almost anything, including power outages, political collapses, and climate catastrophes, it was constructed in 2008 as the most extreme backup plan in the world.
In the event of a power outage, the surrounding permafrost was meant to function as a natural refrigerant. On paper, it’s the most sensible concept in human history.
In reality, observing its growth at this pace begins to feel more like something other than careful planning. Perhaps a collective unspoken recognition that things are getting worse more quickly than most public declarations indicate.
The deposit is about “defusing a ticking time bomb” that threatens the world food system, according to Stefan Schmitz, Executive Director of the Crop Trust. That is not how cautious institutional optimism speaks. That is the vocabulary of someone who has examined the data and experienced a change in the ground beneath their feet. Over 700 million people in more than 75 countries are currently at risk of food security due to conflict and climate change.
By a wide margin, 2023 was the hottest year on record for the entire world. Sub-Saharan Africa’s crop yields are already below half of the global average. In light of this, the Seed Vault is not overly preparatory. It appears to be the only sensible course of action.
This round, Bolivia’s contribution is arguably the most subtle. The 400-year-old Universidad Mayor Real y Pontificia de San Francisco Xavier de Chuquisaca, one of the oldest universities in the Americas, provided the deposit, which was put together with the assistance of 125 farming families who were designated as “Seed Guardians.”
The seeds include bean and maize varieties that are closely associated with Indigenous culture. These varieties have withstood centuries of colonial disruption, but they are currently under threat from early-season frost and drought. Bolivia’s project coordinator, Alfredo José Salinas Arcienega, put it this way: “Each maize variety holds cultural significance for Indigenous communities.” These are not merely examples from agriculture. They are seed-stored memory.
Observing the accumulation of these deposits gives scientists and agricultural researchers a sense of understanding about our near future that has not yet been fully communicated to the general public. Sorghum, eggplant, and lima beans—crops still grown in communities that recall Typhoon Xangsane flooding their gene bank in 2006 and submerging the entire collection in mud—were sent by the Philippines, which has been ranked highest on the World Risk Index for 16 years running.
Approximately 70% of those samples were lost forever. Hidelisa de Chavez, a researcher, expressed a mixture of relief and anxiety when preparing this year’s deposit: the assurance that something has been preserved in Svalbard, combined with the subdued worry that another storm season is inevitable.
There’s a certain urgency to Chad’s entry into the Vault. 1,145 samples of sesame, rice, maize, and sorghum—crops suited to one of the world’s harshest climates—were deposited by the Institut Tchadien de Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement. These are more than just heritage varieties. They are genetic proof that agriculture can withstand intense heat and unpredictable precipitation.
They may prove invaluable to plant breeders attempting to create crops that are appropriate for a warming planet. It’s possible that some of the seeds currently in those cold boxes have characteristics like disease resistance or drought tolerance that aren’t found anywhere else and won’t be useful to science for another 20 or 30 years. This is where the long game is being played.
The Vault has already been used in ways that its designers had hoped would never be required. The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas lost access to its own gene bank, which contained more than 141,000 seed varieties, when the Syrian civil war engulfed Aleppo in 2012. Fortunately, since 2008, the organization had been sending duplicates to Svalbard.
These samples were recovered, and scientists started producing about 30,000 of them annually. Some of those crops, some of which are already extinct in their natural habitats, would simply disappear without Svalbard. It only occurred once. There’s no specific reason to think that it won’t happen to someone else’s collection in the future.
The Vault’s coordinator, Åsmund Asdal, has been in charge since 2015. He speaks of his job with the detached serenity of someone who has truly considered the risks and determined that the best course of action is to remain calm. “Seeds do not last forever,” he says, pointing out that the science of seed longevity is still genuinely lacking and that some species can survive for 50 years, while others can live for a thousand. To find out, he is conducting a 100-year experiment.
Periodically, Nordic crop seeds that were deposited in 1986 are taken out and tested for germination. Decisions that won’t really matter until long after the majority of readers have left will be influenced by the findings.
That is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault’s peculiar, sobering temporality. Election cycles, quarterly earnings, and even generational planning are all unimaginable timescales on which it operates. It is an ark constructed for an unpredictable flood by those who have read the weather well enough to anticipate its arrival. The deposits continue to come in. The collection continues to expand. And over a million seeds are silently waiting for whatever comes next somewhere inside a frozen mountain at the edge of the world.