The Backup Copy of Agriculture, Kept Frozen in a Mountain

Genebanks are fragile: Syria's was in Aleppo, Iraq's in Abu Ghraib, and the Philippines' national collection was flooded and then burned. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault exists so that losing one does not mean losing the seed, storing duplicate samples deep inside a mountain on Spitsbergen where the surrounding permafrost keeps the chambers cold even if the power fails. It is run jointly by the Norwegian government, NordGen and the Crop Trust, and it holds no ownership over anything inside — depositors keep their seed and can withdraw it, which Syria's ICARDA genebank has already done. It now safeguards 1,401,285 samples from 134 depositors covering 6,539 species, and the deposits keep arriving: in February 2026 Guatemala and Niger sent seed for the first time, alongside the vault's first olives.