Svalbard seed vault welcomes its millionth variety

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway received its 1 millionth seed variety on Tuesday.

The “doomsday vault” was designed to be a storage facility to protect crop seeds donated by almost every nation against world disasters. It was completed in 2008.

On Tuesday, the vault attained 1 million different types of seeds, adding plant specimens grown by Cherokee Indians, the estate of Britain’s Prince Charles and 28 other gene banks, according to Reuters.

In addition to keeping a variety of seeds, the vault also contains a “backup” of crops such as corn, wheat and rice if climate change causes harvests to fail, according to Stefan Schmitz, executive director of the Crop Trust, a Bonn-based organization managing the facility.

“We need to preserve this biodiversity, this crop diversity, to provide healthy diets and nutritious foods, and for providing farmers, especially smallholders, with sustainable livelihoods so that they can adapt to new conditions,” Schmitz told Reuters.

The vault became an invaluable resource for Syria after the nation’s civil war kicked into high gear in 2015, when researchers borrowed seeds from the cold storage to repair a damaged seed bank near Aleppo.

The facility is located on a mountainside near the island of Spitsbergen in an Arctic archipelago called Svalbard, halfway between Norway and the North Pole.

Because of its remote location and sub-zero temperatures, the vault is opened only a few times a year to preserve the seeds within. Norway finished an $11 million, yearlong upgrade to the facility in October.