The story of what happened at the Vavilov Institute has a mythic resonance in the mind of every seed banker, and Fowler glanced around almost reverently as he walked through the shadowy halls. Ivanov, a rice specialist, both surrounded by thousands of packets of seeds.
Stchukin, a specialist in peanuts, died of starvation in the building, as did D. Eventually, much of the collection was smuggled out over frozen Lake Ladoga, to a hiding place in the Ural Mountains. When some collections of potatoes needed resowing during the winter, institute workers found a plot outside Leningrad, near the front. At night, thousands of rats would invade the laboratories the staff guarded the seed collections with metal rods. During the winter of 1941-42, when Hitler’s troops were blockading Leningrad, cutting off food and supplies, the scientists who worked there protected the seeds stored inside the buildings, which amounted to several tons of nutritious food, from the starving Russians outside. The Vavilov Institute is a monument to the extraordinary sacrifices people have made in order to save seeds. Should that happen, the only remedy-genetic resistance-might lie in an obscure variety, stored in a seed bank. Any of the diseases currently active in the United States-the rust fungus attacking soybeans the potato late blight (the same one that caused the Irish potato famine), which turns potatoes into a black mass of rot the Western bean cutworm, which feeds on corn plants-has the potential to turn into a devastating nationwide scourge. We tend to imagine apocalypse coming in the form of a bomb, an asteroid, or a tsunami, but should a catastrophe strike one of the world’s major crops Fowler and his fellow seed bankers may be all that stand between us and widespread starvation. As the executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which funds the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in Norway, Fowler is engaged in the Noah-like task of gathering the seeds of about two million varieties of food plants-both the familiar domesticated crops and many of their wild relatives-in order to create the first global seed bank. It’s a nebulously defined position, yet a critical one. Fowler, an American, is the world’s seed banker. She did not look up from sorting through the seeds as two visitors passed, and, with her lips moving silently, she appeared to be lost in thought, or prayer.Ĭary Fowler had an appointment to meet the director general of the Vavilov Institute, Nikolai Dzyubenko, in order to discuss the institute’s seeds. In one of the rooms, a woman in a smock sat at a table with a brown packet, and its contents, pea seeds, spilled out over the table in front of her.
#Norway doomsday vault defenses windows
Petersburg last March, and the gray morning light filtered through the grimy windows of the ceremonial rooms of the Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry, one of the oldest seed banks-and the most storied-in the world, situated on St.
JOOST SWARTEĪ cold drizzle was falling over St. The agriculturalist explained that for any water to get near the seeds it would have to get past two independent pump systems, go uphill through three doors and then survive temperature as low as -18 degree Celsius.Cary Fowler is engaged in the Noah-like task of gathering the seeds of some two million varieties of food plants. No flood as widely but incorrectly reported. Seeds at opposite end.- Cary Fowler May 20, 2017 Some water enters tunnel just inside beyond building you see yearly and is pumped out. There are others who are of the view that the incident is being overplayed and that no actual flooding took place.Ĭary Fowler, former executive director of the Crop Trust - the firm that helped create the vault - posted on Twitter to clarify there had been no 'flooding' at the It didn't flood. The Norwegian government has confirmed its plans to uplift the vault's defenses after the leak. #ClimateChange /bVPkhKVnCe- DEIMOS IMAGING May 22, 2017ĮFFORTS TO MAKE FACILITY EVEN MORE IMPENETRABLE The Global #SeedVault in #Svalbard, seen by #DEIMOS2, as melting permafrost flooded its entrance. The image is of the fortress in the Arctic - Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
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