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Doomsday Seed Vault Assures Marijuana’s Survival
Buried inside a mountain on a remote Norwegian island, agricultural institutions from around the world are collaborating to safeguard important crops in the event of global catastrophe.
Including marijuana.
By preserving genetic material in an insulated, underground facility, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault hopes to guard against the permanent loss of plants that humanity relies on for food and medicine.
According to a Marijuana.com analysis of Svalbard’s database, there are 21,500 cannabis seeds being held for safekeeping in the vault. That’s more weed seeds than there are asparagus, blueberry or raspberry seeds stored at the facility. There are more marijuana genetics in the “Doomsday Seed Vault” than there are for artichoke, cranberry and pear combined.
The stored cannabis seeds originate from at least 17 countries, some of which aren’t at all surprising, like The Netherlands. Five hundred of the marijuana seeds, however, come from North Korea. None originate from the United States.
While the government of Norway owns and operates the Svalbard vault itself, with assistance from the Nordic Genetic Research Center and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Global Crop Diversity Trust, the seeds are actually owned by the gene banks that stashed them there.
Since the facility opened in 2008, there have been 39 deposits of cannabis seeds by three separate organizations: the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety, the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Germany and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, based in Sweden and Norway.
Most recently, on April 9 of this year the Austrian group deposited 1,000 seeds each from France, The Netherlands, Poland and its own country.
The vault’s location, about 800 miles from the North Pole, was selected because of its permafrost and lack of tectonic activity. That means the seeds will stay cold even in the event of a power failure, and the bunker they’re contained in is unlikely to be cracked open by an earthquake or volcanic eruption. And, because it’s located 430 feet above sea level, the facility will stay dry even if global climate change causes the ice caps to melt.
Source: http://truthisscary.com/2014/11/doomsday-seed-vault-assures-marijuanas-survival/
