There Is a 130-Meter-Deep Seed Bunker Near the North Pole That Has Already Been Used Once

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is an underground bunker on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, about 1,300 kilometers from the North Pole. It opened on February 26, 2008. The Norwegian government paid about 45 million kroner (US $8.8 million in 2008 dollars) to dig 130 meters into a sandstone mountain at Platåberget and build three vaults at the end of the tunnel, sealed behind multiple airlocks. The site was chosen because Spitsbergen has no tectonic activity, sits well above projected sea-level rise, and is buried in natural permafrost.

The vault stores backup samples of seeds from agricultural genebanks worldwide. As of 2025, it holds 1,355,591 distinct accessions. Each depositing institution remains the legal owner of its seeds; storage is free. The seeds are sealed in three-ply foil packets and held at −18 °C. If the cooling system failed permanently, the surrounding permafrost is cold enough that the vault interior would take an estimated two centuries to warm to 0 °C — long enough for any plausible recovery.

The vault has already been used. In September 2015, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), which had run the world's largest collection of dryland-crop seeds at Tel Hadya, near Aleppo, made the first emergency withdrawal in the vault's history. Its Aleppo genebank had become inaccessible during the Syrian civil war. ICARDA pulled approximately 38,000 samples, replanted them at facilities in Lebanon and Morocco, and over the following years quietly returned regenerated seed back to Svalbard. A 2016 thaw event sent meltwater 15 meters into the tunnel before refreezing; the seeds were unaffected, and the entrance was waterproofed in 2019.