The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located underground on a remote island in the Arctic
Circle, is the world's largest security storage for seeds.
Credit: Heiko Junge/NTB scanpix/Zuma
The so-called doomsday seed vault located underground on a remote island in the Arctic Ocean has gained a neighbor, and the new vault, opened March 27, will act as a digital archive for the world's data.
The underground Svalbard Global Seed Vault was built in 2008, about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) from the North Pole. The frozen-storage facility houses the world's most important crop seeds, acting as a backup for gene banks around the world and protecting the valuable genetic material from natural disasters, equipment malfunctions, war and other problems, according to Cary Fowler, a scientist, conservationist and biodiversity advocate who first envisioned the vault . Thus, the moniker "doomsday vault."
This new vault shares the same mountain as the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, and will do for the world's digital heritage what the Global Seed Vault has done for plants, according to Piql, the Norwegian tech company leading the new vault project. [In Photos: Take a Tour of the World's 'Doomsday' Seed Vault https://www.livescience.com/58497-second-doomsday-vault-opens-for-data.html
