Inside the Svalbard Seed Vault

So this is like the world's most important freezer? It is. Really. laughs The most important room in the world, someone has said. These are pretty big claims for a place located just 1300 km, or 800 miles from the north pole. But then, this is no ordinary place. It's the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

Well, actually, this is just its front door. Inside the seed vault are a series of tunnels. It's not actually that cold right here, but as we go deeper, it is only going to get colder.

This is Bente.

You're an engineer, Bente?

Yes, I am.

Are you gonna show us where to go?

chuckles Yeah.

Fantastic! How many doors are there?

One, two, three, four, five doors until we are into the secret room.

Five doors to the secret room.

Woah. That's what I'm talking about. These are the lengths of tunnel that take you down into the seed vault. This facility was built to last around 200 years and withstand earthquakes and explosions.

It was placed on the side of a mountain so even if all the ice on earth melts it will still be above sea level. There are three separate vault rooms where seeds are stored but only one of them is in use right now. And it's buried over 120 meters from the front door.

The whole point of putting the vaults so deep in this mountain is to put it within permafrost. So, all around me, the earth naturally stays around -4 or -5 all year round.

And, that way, if something did happen and the cooling stopped flowing here, there was no power. Then, well, behind these doors, it would still remain probably, you know, -4 or -5 Celsius, forever. Assuming, of course, global temperatures don't rise that much.

This place is sometimes called "The Doomsday Vault," because even in a worst case scenario it should preserve the diversity of the world's food crops. Now we are really in the mountain.

Surrounded by permafrost. And, here's a cross tunnel that leads to three vault doors. Vault number 1 is up there, Vault number 2, and this is the one that is actually being used. And then, vault number 3.

It's pretty amazing to look up and see ice-covered ceilings and walls everywhere.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault works essentially like a bank vault?

Yes, it's almost, yeah, because the seeds lay in the boxes like this. These boxes are sealed when they come to Svalbard. And none of us can open it.

We put it through the security system at the airports just to check that it isn't any explosives or anything in it. But it works like a bank box. We can't open this. Only the depositor can open and take out their seeds.

So you don't open any of the seeds, any of the boxes that come here?

No. Well.

How do you know that people are really depositing the seeds, like barely they say they are not, and other things?

Just because they have signed the contract. That's it. We can't be sure about it. Of course, we trust them.

Would there be seeds for some crops that people might consider illicit, like marijuana?

That is said that that shall not be in here. No drugs and also no gene-modified material.

No genetically modified seeds go in here?

Yeah, Norway has asked for that no genetic material is kept in here.

Are there any particularly strange crops? Has anyone deposited anything that is really odd or weird?

Ahhh.. No, nothing weird is in here, but we get some questions from people that want to put in their own private seeds. I've also had letters from men wanting to put their gene material in here. That is really strange and we don't answer those.

This is the door to the vault and behind here, there are nearly a million different varieties of seeds, from all over the world, kept at minus 18 degrees Celsius.

You know how I can tell that it's minus 18°C in here? You can actually feel the moisture in your nose freeze so, Your nostrils get all stiff...

Yeah, and I see behind you we have some Canadian seeds, which is exciting for me because I am Canadian. So what sort of things do we have... From Canada, I'm really not... Not sure because... This box... On the outside doesn't tell what's in it, but, These numbers here are connected to a database on the internet so you can go in there afterwards.

Derek: There you go.

Bente: Yeah. You can go find out what has Canada got stored in the Seed Vault.

What are we looking at right here?

It's like a bank vault except everything that you've put in there is publicly available.

Yeah, it is. (chuckles) These are the coolest boxes I think. They are from North Korea.

Derek: Oh my goodness!

Bente: Wooden handmade boxes.

Derek: They look like they come from the 1960s or something. Do you think?

Bente: Yeah, they do.

Derek: They built them specially.

Bente: They built them specially because they got the measurements of how big should the boxes be and these are built exactly of those measurements.

And here you see that North Korea is placed on the same shelf as USA; it's just on the back there. It's on the back side. And you have South Korea, just on the back.

So here there are like a small United Nations, deep in the mountains of Svalbard. (Chuckles)

So these are the last few bare shelves in Vault 2. Once the other two vaults are full, there will be around 3 million different species of plants stored here with over 500 seeds per sample.

So one day, there may be over a billion seeds stored inside this mountain, representing the vast majority of Earth's agricultural diversity. And you don't know today what kind of seeds that you can grow in 20, 30, 40 years from now, because of the climate change.

Perhaps you have to use another type of seed thirty years from now that can handle warmer climate, dryer climate, wetter climate, whatever is going to happen.

So that is why it's so important to have a backup of all the seeds so that you are sure that you can also grow the food we need for the next generations to come.

But this isn't the only seed bank on Earth. There are around 1700 other gene banks around the world, run by different countries and organizations.

And, at a cost of $9 million to build the Svalbard seed vault and millions more to run it, it's worth asking whether this is a costly redundancy or a valuable insurance policy.

And perhaps, the best people to answer this question are the Syrians, who, last year, were the first to make a withdrawal from the seed vault.

The gene bank in Aleppo, in Syria, is now out of order; it's been bombed. So one third of the material that is kept in here is now taken down to Morocco and Lebanon. And this is some of the material that now has been returned, so to get the material going again.

So that's why it's empty.

Will those seeds actually be used to grow crops?

Yeah, they will.

Yeah. Over the last 13 thousand years, we have cultivated millions of species of plants. The agricultural revolution underpinned the technological and population explosions that made our modern lives possible.

The risk of a real Doomsday scenario is incredibly remote. But, whatever happens, thanks to this outpost at the top of the world, at least our seeds are safe.

Hey, I'm currently on a train traveling from Washington, D.C. to New York City so I can't talk too loud. And actually after Norway, I went to Seoul, South Korea, Los Angeles, Boston, New York and Washington, so it's been some crazy travels for me.

And on all these travels I've been listening to audiobooks from Audible who also support Veritasium which I am very thankful for. If you didn't know already, Audible has like 250,000 titles in all areas of literature, including fiction, non-fiction and periodicals.

And if you go to Audible.com/veritasium you can get a 30-day free trial of the website where you can just try out listening to a book. So if you are at all interested in listening to audiobooks, I highly recommend you check them out.

And there is a book I can recommend to you, it is my favorite fiction book of all time. It's called "Everything is Illuminated" by Jonathon Safran Foer.

It is- I don't know, it’s just such a complex interwoven novel, you have to read it or listen to it to know what I mean. But you can check it out. You can download that book for free for a one-month trial or you can pick any other book of your choosing.

So, I really want to thank Audible for supporting me and helping me go to all these amazing places. And I want to thank you for watching.