Lesson objective: Culture: global seed banks
1
1.31
there?
Listen and read about the Svalbard Global Seed Bank. How many seed samples can be kept
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SVALBARD
(NORWAY)
Location: the island of Spitsbergen,
in Svalbard (Norway)
Distance from 1,300 kilometres
the North Pole:
Opened in 2008
Built by: Norway's government
Seeds from: 78 countries
Total capacity: 4.5 million seed samples
Web Encyclopedia
Svalbard Global Seed Bank
The Svalbard Global Seed Bank is like
a library - it has been designed to store
4.5 million seed samples.* Seeds for
crops, fruit trees, vegetables and herbs
from around the world are kept there.
It's like making backups of all the world's plants!
The Global Seed Bank was built to protect the world's plants from
possible problems such as war and climate change. In the future, if plants
are destroyed, we will be able to grow new ones using these seeds.
Hopefully, most of the seeds in Svalbard won't be needed. But some
of them have already been used. After Syria's plants were destroyed in
a war, seeds from the Global Seed Bank were used to grow new crops.
The Global Seed Bank is located inside a mountain, 130 metres above sea
level, to protect it from the effects of global warming. The temperature
of the rooms is cooled to -18 degrees Celsius by a special cooling system.
All countries can store seeds there. For example, 32 types of potato were sent from Ireland. Poland sent its first
seeds there in 2019.406 different types of Polish crops were sent, and more will be sent in the next few years.
*one seed sample = 500 seeds