A distant seed vault on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen is receiving new deposits this week from gene banks in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania. Nicknamed the ‘Doomsday Vault,’ the depository is opened just a few instances a yr for seed withdrawals and deposits; it is going to be sealed once more on February 18.

Holding over 1.1 million seed samples from 5,400 completely different plant species, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a serious technique of conserving genetic variety in crops. The vault’s shops mirror the crops on which humankind is most dependent: It has over 150,000 strains of wheat and rice and over 80,000 sorts of barley. The vault can maintain as much as 4.5 million samples.

The gene banks concerned on this week’s exercise hail from Sudan, Uganda, New Zealand, Germany, and Lebanon, according to Reuters. The Lebanon-based group is the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas, the group that made the primary withdrawal from the vault in 2015. Previously, the group was primarily based in Syria, the place a few of its collections had been broken through the nation’s civil warfare, forcing the group to attract on the Arctic vault’s shops. The group will likely be depositing round 8,000 seed samples.

“The fact that the seed collection destroyed in Syria during the civil war has been systematically rebuilt shows that the vault functions as an insurance for current and future food supply and for local food security,” Norwegian International Development Minister Anne Beathe Tvinnereim told Reuters.

In 2020, the vault acquired seeds from the Cherokee Nation, the place the botanical duplicates could be safeguarded in case the unpredictable climate in Oklahoma devastates the native crops.

“One of these monstrous storms would be enough to wipe out our community gene banks, so [the Svalbard Global Seed Vault] is a real safety box for us,” Pat Gwin, senior director of environmental assets for the Cherokee Nation, informed Earther on the time.

The vault will open twice once more this yr—as soon as from June 6 to June 10 and once more from October 24 to October 27, in response to the vault’s website.

Being saved within the vault doesn’t assure the seeds’ preservation. In 2017, warmer-than-normal temperatures prompted a deluge close to the entrance tunnel. But as chances are you’ll know should you’ve ever misplaced a password, having a number of copies of any essential info is nonetheless useful.

More: The Problem With the Doomsday Seed Vault