Daily Mail Online: Inside the Doomsday Vault: Rare footage provides a glimpse inside secretive bunker in the Arctic - as more than 14,000 new samples are added
3 March 2025
The idea of a doomsday vault hidden on a remote Arctic island might sound like something from the latest James Bond movie.
But the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is very much real - and could one day save Earth from disaster.
Located on a mountainside on Spitsbergen, an island in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in the Arctic Sea, the vault houses 'spare copies' of over 1.3million seed varieties.
The seeds are stored inside the vault at temperatures of around −18°C (−0.4°F).
And the permafrost and thick rock surrounding the bunker ensure the samples will remain frozen, even if power is lost.
Should disaster strike - whether that is by war, an accident or a natural disaster - the vault could provide survivors with access to every important crop variety in the world.