"The vault will in all likelihood be used sooner than one might think," without a global catastrophe occurring. Cary Fowler had said so in February 2012, former executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the foundation that manages the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the world's most important Norwegian underground seed depository, created in 2008 to store the greatest possible variety of samples from every part of the Earth and preserve agricultural biodiversity.

On 23 September the foundation announced on its website that the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (Icarda), a seed bank formerly based in the Syrian city of Aleppo, has made the first request to withdraw some seeds it had previously deposited at Svalbard, in an attempt to restart its collection work following the forced relocation of its headquarters to the Lebanese capital, Beirut, away from the horrors of the civil war that has been ongoing in Syria since 2011. A fratricidal war that in four years has caused 250,000 deaths and forced more than eleven million people to abandon their homes.

Icarda has requested the return of 130 of the 325 deposited samples, which contained a total of 116,000 seeds. Among these are certain species of wheat and barley that also grow in arid areas. "Protecting global biodiversity in this way is precisely the purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault," declared Brian Lainoff, spokesperson for the Crop Trust.

https://youtu.be/BYK11SJzgJk

The vault is located on the island of Spitsbergen, in the Arctic Svalbard archipelago, approximately one thousand kilometres north of Norway. The facility can hold up to 4.5 million varieties and is managed together with the Oslo government. Today there are more than 864,000 samples stored at a temperature of -18 degrees Celsius, received from nearly every country on the planet. Even if the power were to suddenly fail for any reason, the vault would maintain its temperature for the next two hundred years.

Nobody, it is to be hoped, would ever want to find themselves in a position of putting the vault to that test, but knowing that there are people spending time, funds and above all ingenuity to make up for the shortcomings of others who use the same resources to destroy gives one cause to breathe a sigh of relief.