Frozen deep within the permafrost landscape of Norway’s remote Svalbard archipelago is an imposing structure that could have come straight out of a Stars Wars movie. From the outside, only the entrance is visible. Buried inside the bowels of a mountain, this is a gigantic vault, built to store seed samples of more than 6,000 different plant species. It is the world’s largest seed-storage facility, built to insure the world of a robust supply of seed crops in the event of “end-of-the-world” scenarios – major wars, famines or pestilence.

Conceived as early as 1984, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (GSV) was opened to great fanfare in 2008 by the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre, operating in partnership with the Norwegian government and the Crop Trust.

Svalbard seems to be the ideal location for a global seed bank, given its remote location some 1300 km inside the Arctic Circle and its year-round frigid climate, essential for maintaining sub-zero temperatures within the vault.

For such an important facility, the GSV is remarkably spartan. The whole operation is designed to function with minimal need for human presence. Staff appear only on days when fresh deposits are scheduled to arrive. Inside the imposing entrance doors, large industrial monochrome tunnels with curved concrete and metals walls tunnel towards the main vault 100 meters inside the mountain. This is where the sealed boxes containing seeds of more than 6,000 plant species lie. Impressive though these numbers are, the facility has the potential to hold up to 4.5 million crops. At around 500 seeds per crop, this means there is space for an astonishing 2.25 billion seeds within this single building.