“Seeds generally are the basis for everything. It is almost as important as water and air,” says Haga. “Not too many think about crop diversity as being so fundamentally important, but it is. This is particularly important with the challenges of climate change. But the genetic diversity contained in the vault could provide the DNA traits needed to develop new strains for whatever challenges the world or a particular region will face in the future.One of the 200,000 varieties of rice within the vault could have the trait needed to adapt rice to higher temperatures, for example, or to find resistance to a new pest or disease. And many don’t exist outside of the seed collections they came from. The seeds lying in the deep freeze of the vault include wild and old varieties, many of which are not in general use anymore. This monoculture nature of agriculture leaves food supplies more susceptible to threats such as diseases and drought. has lost over 90% of its fruit and vegetable varieties since the 1900s. Only 10% of the rice varieties that China used in the 1950s are still used today, for example. But while crop yields have increased, biodiversity has decreased to the point that now only about 30 crops provide 95% of human food-energy needs. Over the past 50 years, agricultural practices have changed dramatically, with technological advances allowing large-scale crop production. They have very little monetary value, but the boxes potentially hold the keys to the future of global food security. In here, the seeds are stored in vacuum-packed silver packets and test tubes in large boxes that are neatly stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves. There are three vaults leading off from the chamber, but only one is currently in use, and its door is covered in a thick layer of ice, hinting at the subzero temperatures inside. At the end of this corridor is a chamber, an added layer of security to protect the vaults containing the seeds. Through one door is a wide concrete tunnel illuminated by strip lighting leading 430 ft.

The entrance leads to a small tunnel-like room filled with the loud whirring noise of electricity and cooling systems required to keep the temperature within the vault consistent. Its only neighbor is a similar repository buried away from the dangers of the world: the Arctic World Archive, which aims to preserve data for the world’s governments and private institutions, opened deep in a nearby mine on March 27. It is situated in a safe place,” says Bente Naeverdal, a property manager who oversees the day-to-day operation of the vault. “It is away from the places on earth where you have war and terror, everything maybe you are afraid of in other places. It was precisely for its remoteness that Svalbard was chosen as the location of the vault. Near the entrance to the facility, a rectangular wedge of concrete that juts out starkly against the snowy landscape, the doomsday nickname seems eerily apt.

This past winter offered the gene bank a chance to redress the balance. Genetic material is being lost all over the globe,” says Marie Haga, executive director of the Crop Trust. “There are big and small doomsdays going on around the world every day. On this occasion, samples from India, Pakistan and Mexico were being deposited alongside seeds from Syria, many of whose citizens are living through their own apocalypse. But it is the much smaller, localized destruction and threats facing gene banks all over the world that the vault was designed to protect against-and it’s why the vault was opened in February, when TIME visited. The Global Seed Vault has been dubbed the “doomsday” vault, which conjures up an image of a reserve of seeds for use in case of an apocalyptic event or a global catastrophe. It is the farthest north you can fly on a commercial airline, and apart from the nearby town of Longyearbyen, it is a vast white expanse of frozen emptiness. It would be difficult to find a place more remote than the icy wilderness of Svalbard. “Inside this building is 13,000 years of agricultural history,” says Brian Lainoff, lead partnerships coordinator of the Crop Trust, which manages the vault, as he hauls open the huge steel door leading inside the mountain. It is essentially a huge safety deposit box, holding the world’s largest collection of agricultural biodiversity. Millions of these tiny brown specks, from more than 930,000 varieties of food crops, are stored in the Global Seed Vault on Spitsbergen, part of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. It’s not coal, oil or precious minerals, but seeds. Deep in the bowels of an icy mountain on an island above the Arctic Circle between Norway and the North Pole lies a resource of vital importance for the future of humankind.

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