![]() The permafrost also acts as a natural refrigerator, although coal-powered refrigeration units are also installed. Even if the polar ice caps were to melt entirely, Svalbard would stay undampened. ![]() Secondly, it’s way, way above sea level, making it eternally dry. For one, it’s so remote from human movement, that it would be entirely unlikely for someone to traipse along and start fucking with the seeds. It’s just proven to be the most practical place to store our seeds. Occasionally “librarians” and other biologists will check on the seeds, but there is no real staff. The Vault is also patrolled heavily and constantly by high-tech security. Inside the vault, seeds are sealed in tiny packages that have been specially designed to keep moisture out. ![]() ![]() It’s a naturally freezing cavern, about 400 feet long, carved into the side of a sandstone mountain. The vault itself is like something out of a sci-fi movie. In 2008, however, the two projects merged, and the entire collection of seeds – by this point, containing about 1.5 million samples – was moved to the Seed Vault in Svalbard, which was declared in full operation in late February of that year. This was done in conjunction with an African project that was more or less doing the same thing. As such, a team of Norwegian scientists stored about 10,000 different types of seeds, refrigerated, in an underground mine. Most seeds, as we may remember from 9th-grade biology classes, can survive being suspended at super-low temperatures more or less indefinitely and still be viable for planting. In the 1980s, Norway, concerned with plant and animal extinction, began to amass seeds and genetic samples of every type of plant then known to humankind. Groot can star.Ĭoncern over the robust diversity and continued existence of the planet’s plant life has actually led to one of the coolest of all human endeavors: The Svalbard Global Seed Vault (or globale frøhvelv in its native Norwegian), a gigantic repository located way, way north of the Arctic Circle on a distant Norwegian island, and may one of the most important banks in the world. I’d still love to see that horror movie, though. Arbor Day is now something of a major happening all over the world, and planting trees is seen as a noble act. Arbor Day was celebrated in 1872 in Nebraska. The first Arbor Day, a quick bot of research will reveal, was actually celebrated as long ago as 1594 in the Spanish village of Mondoñedo, and the first U.S. Indeed, Arbor Day reaches into an old and international tradition of looking after the world’s plants. In the ensuing span since my long-ago childhood, however, the environmentalist movement began in this country in earnest, Tree People became an enormous organization, and looking after trees became a more earnest, serious activity. The holiday, by the way, is devoted to planting trees, and ensuring that trees continue their long live on this little green ball of ours. Could there, media asked, be a more boring holiday than one devoted to trees? That MAD spoof, by the way (which appeared in issue #227, in December 1981), posited a horror movie based on Arbor Day, and I’m surprised an actual slasher never surfaced. Arbor Day was, in movies, TV, and in one particularly notable issue of MAD Magazine, often presented as a punchline. If your experience with Arbor Day is anything like mine, then you may be snickering at its very name.
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