Arctic ‘Doomsday Vault’ opens to retrieve seeds for Syria

LONGYEARBYEN, Norway: In the first withdrawal from a “doomsday” seed vault in the Arctic, thousands of seeds that were originally kept in war-stricken Syria have been safely delivered to Morocco and Lebanon, officials said Monday.
Now, with no sign of conditions in Syria improving, scientists have begun recovering their critical inventory of seeds, sourced from around the Fertile Crescent and beyond, that have been in safekeeping beneath the Arctic ice.
The seeds are being planted at new facilities in Lebanon and Morocco, allowing scientists to resume the important research they've been doing for decades, away from the barrel bombs of Aleppo.
Gene banks and organizations around the world have deposited about 860,000 samples of seeds at the Global Seed Vault in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago to back up their own collections in case of man-made or natural calamities.
Since the facility, sometimes known as a “doomsday vault,” opened eight years ago, this is the first time that seeds have been withdrawn.
In secret shipments last month, about 38,000 seed samples including wheat, barley, lentil and chickpea were sent from Norway to research stations in Morocco and Lebanon operated by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, or ICARDA. The center is located in Aleppo but is no longer able to make full use of its facilities due to the war in Syria.
“It just shows that the global system of fail-safe backup works,” said Michael Koch, of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which funded the shipments.
The shipments were conducted secretly to avoid any security problems.
“We wanted to make sure that the publicity around this deposit is not taken by someone for different purposes,” Koch told an Associated Press journalist visiting the Svalbard Seed Vault, just 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) from the North Pole.