The Svalbard Global Seed Vault

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault

This article relates to Wild Dark Shore

A main character in Charlotte McConaghy's novel Wild Dark Shore is employed as a caretaker for an isolated seed bank. The author has stated that the facility is based on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located on the remote Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole.

A seed bank's main purpose is to safeguard the planet's food supply, creating a repository that could be turned to should a disaster wipe out humanity's crops. It's believed that a well-preserved seed can stay viable for centuries. According to a 2022 article in The Guardian, there are approximately 1,700 seed banks around the world.

The first seed bank was created in St. Petersburg in the 1920s by Russian scientist Nikolai Vavilov, but the idea that such a thing could be crucial to humanity's survival gained traction in the 1980s. An International Plant Treaty was signed in 2001 by the Conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, calling for the establishment of a seed vault and creating rules around accessing and sharing the resource between nations.

The group subsequently approached the government of Norway about creating a global facility at Svalbard, chosen because it's the farthest north a person can travel on a scheduled flight, so although it's remote, it's still accessible. It's also perpetually cold, with an average temperature of -6.7°C (19.9°F), so it's easier to keep the structure at a temperature at which the seeds will remain frozen. In addition, the area is geographically stable, and humidity is low. Finally, it's well above sea level, so it should be unaffected by rising sea levels. The area's permafrost was supposed to keep liquid water from breaching the edifice, but in 2016 global warming resulted in permafrost melting and water did get in. (No seeds were damaged, and additional measures have since been taken to keep the facility dry.) McConaghy incorporates this event as an important plot point in her novel.

After a feasibility study Norway agreed to fund and establish the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Designed by Norwegian architect Peter Wilhelm and built at a cost of $8.8 million (USD), it opened in 2008, and by 2013 approximately a third of all crops worldwide were represented at Svalbard.

The entrance to the seed vault is through a concrete structure, decorated by an illuminated fiberoptic artwork called Perpetual Repercussion. Created by Norwegian artist Dyveke Sanne, the piece's mirrors and prisms reflect light and increase the ability to locate the structure more easily both day and night.

Svalbard is considered a backup for all the other seed banks worldwide, and the facility only accepts duplicate seeds from these other agencies; genetically modified seeds are prohibited. The donors hermetically seal their seeds in custom-made, three-ply foil packages and then pack them in boxes (about 300-400 seed packages per box) to be shipped to Svalbard by air. The boxes are scanned at the airport to ensure only seeds are in the containers. After arriving by truck at the facility, the boxes are carried into the Portal Room, a long corridor just inside the vault's door. They're then transported down the even longer Seed Vault Tunnel to an area known as The Cathedral, a cavernous room used for temporary storage. The space also holds three doors, each of which leads to a Seed Chamber that can hold 3,000 seed boxes—a total of 4.5 million crop varieties. A virtual tour is available, but reading McConaghy's description in Wild Dark Shore is a wonderful way to get a feel for the heavy iron doors and the long, cold tunnels that make up the facility.

The boxes are carefully catalogued and stored on racks, although they're operated under "black box conditions" (i.e., no one knows which boxes contain which seeds), and withdrawals can only be made by the agency that deposited the seeds in the first place. A list of seeds present at the site is maintained online.

There are no permanent staff at the Seed Vault. The company that manages the site, NordGen, dispatches personnel there only when it's scheduled to be opened for a deposit; they're also the only people allowed to handle the seed boxes. Another company, Statsbygg, is responsible for servicing the vault and providing continuous surveillance.

Svalbard currently holds "several tens of thousands [of] variants of important food plants such as beans, wheat and rice"—more than four thousand species. There has only been one withdrawal, in 2015, when a research facility in Aleppo, Syria was bombed during their civil war. Some 148,000 seeds were destroyed, but the Svalbard seed bank held duplicates of 80% of the lost seeds and was able to resupply the scientists studying drought- and heat-tolerant crops.

Entrance to Svalbard Global Seed Vault, courtesy of Michael Major for Crop Trust (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Filed under Nature and the Environment

This article relates to Wild Dark Shore. It first ran in the June 18, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.