If you ever enter this place – well, it’s not a good sign, because it means something of apocalyptic proportions has happened.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a seed bank located on Spitsbergen, a remote northern island that’s part of Norway.
The vault holds multitudes of seeds in the case of a global catastrophe destroys most of the earth’s crops. Currently, it holds about 864,000 distinct seeds and has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million. It has fully 1/3 of the world’s most important food crop seeds inside of it.
The vault is buried 390 feet into a sandstone mountain with no permanent staff and no one person has all the codes you need to get inside. For hundreds of years, these seeds will be kept safe and a study done on the feasibility of the vault suggests the seeds might be preserved safely for even thousands of years. Each seed is packaged in a three-ply foil packet sealed with heat to ensure there’s no moisture.
It’s fully automated and is remotely monitored. The vault is only open for special visitors and a few days a year when it accepts new seeds. And, also, it’s in the middle of the Arctic, very close to the North Pole.
Interesting, huh? Well, we thought so.
Well, This Is What I Think 
Having seen this place mentioned in a couple of documentaries, the amounts of seed held do not seem to be at all large – and I wish they were, as it would take many many years for such seeds to make a food crop for a population – and what might happen during that time of need is too awful to contemplate.
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I don’t want to go there. But I am VERY glad that it exists.
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