The room is a vault(地下库)designed to hold around 2 million seeds,representing all known
varieties of the world’S crops.It is being built to safeguard the world’S food supply against
nuclear War,climate change，terrorism，rising sea levels，earthquakes and the collapse of
electricity supplies。“If the worst came to the worst，this would allow the world to reconstruct
agriculture on this planet，”says Cary Fowler,director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust，an
independent international organisation promoting the project.
The Norwegian(挪威的)government is planning tO create the seed bank next year at the
request of crop scientists.The ＄3 million vault will be built deep inside a sandstone mountain on
the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen.The vault will have metre-thick walls of reinforced
concrete and will be protected behind two airlocks and high-security doors.
The vault’S seed collection will represent the products of some 10，000 years of plant
breeding by the world’S farmers.Though most are no longer widely planted，.the varieties contain
vital genetic properties still regularly used in plant breeding.
To survive，the seeds need freezing temperatures.Operators plan to replace the air inside the
vault each winter,when temperatures in Spitsbergen are around-18℃.But even if some disaster
meant that the vault Was abandoned,the permanently frozen soil would keep the seeds alive.And
even accelerated global warming would take many decades to penetrate the mountain vault.
“This will be the world’s most secure gene bank，” Says Fowler.“But its seeds will only
be used when all other samples have gone for sOme reason.”
The project comes at a time when there is growing concern about the safety of existing seed
