The entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, rising from the permafrost like a Bond villain’s lair. Photo by Mari Tefre/Global Crop Diversity Trust.Seeds are a bit fabulous. They are a valuable source of food products (rice, wheat, corn, flours, oils, alcohol, etc), they are a wonderfully efficient component of plant reproduction and they are a critical supply of the world’s collective plant genome.

Another thing that warrants a degree of excitement is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV). If you’re unfamiliar with the seed vault, it was opened in 2008 at Svalbard, the northernmost place on earth that has regular flights (about one a day I believe). The seed vault is positioned about 120 metres inside a mountain on Spitsbergen Island, a location chosen because of its environmental and political stability. More . . .