LONGYEARBYEN, Norway — In the wake of global warming, endless natural disasters and a world filled with terrorism, the fear of losing the plants that provide nearly everyone’s food is a reality many don’t give a second thought.

A new seed vault in one of the most barren regions of the world; however, will provide a safeguard for the world’s plant food supply in the event of some catastrophic occurrence.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a project funded largely in part by the Norwegian government and overseen by the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT) was designed to house as many as 4.5 million of the world’s crop seeds. Virtually every crop seed from every country would be protected.

The Rome-based GCDT organization works to ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security in an effort to fight hunger and preserve the future of agriculture.

The structure is made of thick concrete walls and is carved deep, more than 350 feet, into frozen rock at an altitude that would ensure safety against flooding even in a worst case scenario such as a meltdown of Antarctica.

The permafrost or perpetually frozen ground would provide a natural refrigerated backup to preserve the seeds in case of electrical failures. The island of Svalbard is located approximately 600 miles from the North Pole.

Construction began in March of this year and just last week the “cooling down” phase of the project began as refrigeration units began pumping cool air into the cavern bringing the temperature of the sandstone rock surrounding the seed vault from its current 23 degrees Fahrenheit to about 0 degrees Fahrenheit.

Cary Fowler, executive director of the GCDT said the vault could protect seed supplies for hundreds if not thousands of years. “The seed vault is the perfect place for keeping seeds safe for centuries. At these temperatures, seeds for important crops like wheat, barley and peas can last for up to 10,000 years,” he said.

Because of the critical mission of the project, how the seeds will be stored and the design and operation of the vault have been paramount in its development.

“We ran a lot of computer simulations to determine the optimum approach and believe we have found a very effective and especially energy efficient way to establish reliably cool conditions inside the vault,” said project manager Magnus Bredeli Tveiten with Statsbygg, the Norwegian government’s Directorate of Public Construction. “We believe the design of the facility will ensure that the seeds will stay well-preserved even if such forces as global warming raise temperatures outside the facility.”

Last summer the House Agriculture Committee voted to adopt an amendment to the 2007 Farm Bill (H.R. 2419) to authorize $60 million in funding by the United States for the GCDT.

Subcommittee Chairman Congressman Dennis Cardoza (D-CA) said, “The Global Crop Diversity Trust may be one of the most important international organizations many of you have never heard of. The Trust ensures the conservation and availability of diversified crops, which is critical to defeating hunger and achieving food security worldwide.”

Fowler said, “Conserving the vast diversity of crop varieties is the only way to guarantee that farmers and plant breeders will have the raw materials needed to improve and adapt their crops to meet these challenges - and provide food for us into the future.”

While an increased awareness on the necessity of seed banks seems important in today’s world, the idea has been around as long as people have grown their own food. Ancient civilizations used seed banks to provide for future growing seasons.

The National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation (NCGRP), a USDA, Agriculture Research Service facility located in Fort Collins, Colo. is the main federal seed bank in the United States.

The facility, one of the world’s largest gene-banks, conserves genetic resources of crops and animals important to U.S. agriculture and landscapes.

In addition to being a seed bank, NCGRP is a repository for animal genetic resources in the form of semen and plant genetic resources.

According to the GCDT, an estimated 90 percent of the more than 6 million samples of crops conserved around the world are maintained as seeds. The rest are conserved as collections of living plants in the field or as collections of tissue cultures or plantlets in a laboratory.

NCGRP also houses the base collection for plant genetic resources for USDA’s National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS), a network of cooperating institutions, agencies and research units all across the country that store and research plants varieties specific to their areas.

Dr. David Ellis, the curator at Ft. Collins, said he is more concerned about climate changes affecting world crops as opposed to terrorism or nuclear threats.

“I worry more about things like global warming. Plants evolve slowly to changes in their environment and climate change is happening so fast they won’t be able to evolve,” he said.

The facility conducts research to aid in helping plants adapt to climate changes and to become resistant to new diseases and infestations.

“Farmers are keenly aware of the value of new plant varieties that have increased resistance,” said Ellis. “All of our major crops have seeds you can store. The key is keeping them alive for 100 years. Mother Nature has done a great job; we just have to use the best practices to keep seeds alive.”

The center stores a collection of about 700,000 seeds and acts as a backup to other facilities in the world for their collections including the entire global rice collection.

The USDA began gene-banking in the 1890s through a series of Plant Introduction Stations. The National Seed Storage Laboratory, later to become the NCGRP, was constructed in 1958 to consolidate the plant collections into a single facility.

The Norwegian government will own the “Doomsday or Noah’s Ark Vault” as it has become known but countries that contribute seeds to the project will maintain ownership of those seeds. The vault should officially open on Feb. 26, 2008.

For more information, visit the GCDT website at www.croptrust.org