Since 2007 , the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has maintained a depositary of the humanity ’s agricultural inheritance . A serial of tunnels bored into the side of a stack , this vault is climate - controlled , unafraid against architectonic activity or sea - level rise , and design to admit up to 4.5 million different seed varieties for centuries to number . build 900 km northerly of Europe in Svalbard , a bare archipelago in Norway , it pose on the edge of the Arctic Ocean , containing duplicate specimen from other seed bank vault dissipate throughout the cosmos . There are more than 1,000 harvest multifariousness collecting worldwide , but the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard was built by from refinement because it is the fail - safe , the insurance policy , the last resort .
Since its origination , the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has repeatedly paint a picture a good sense of the apocalypse . Everyone from Fox News to Wired clip has used the unofficial nickname ‘ doom seed vault ’ to bear on to the project , and it is routinely described as a last haven and refuge for plant biodiversity should some global catastrophe put down the man ’s crop . ‘ The “ day of reckoning ” vault is designed to keep millions of source samples secure from natural and affected disasters : globose warming , asteroid work stoppage , flora disease , atomic war , and even earthquakes,’National Geographic report in 2008 . Wired , in 2011 , bring up to it as ‘ the world ’s insurance policy insurance against botanical final solution ’ .
Cary Fowler , the former executive music director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust , which helped to establish the ejaculate vault , has neither coin nor exclusively disavowed , the condition ‘ doomsday ’ as it employ to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault : ‘ We believe that in the case of a regional or global catastrophe that this seed vault would prove to be very , very useful , ’ he told The Washington Post in 2008 . ‘ However , it was n’t primarily with that in creative thinker that we start the planning of this adeptness . ’
Along with the spoken language of catastrophe amount a very specific articulation of meter . We think of our family relationship to the environment in the straightaway . Global warming , we ’re told , will wipe out all life within our lifetimes , or in our children ’s lifetime . In this room , environmental sermon resemble the rant of religious millenarians , who stubbornly keep that the apocalypse will happen on their watch . As of 2010 , 41 per cent of Americans say that they await Jesus to bring back to Earth by 2050 . This obsession with at hand disaster suggests that we see nature on a particularly human , individual scale . When we think of environmental scathe and the human impact on the ecosystem , we think almost exclusively in the shortsighted full term . The millennium , be it religious or environmental , is always coming the Clarence Day after tomorrow .
Standing opposed to this narrow band of apocalyptic time is ‘ deep meter ’ , a sense of plate rooted in geology rather than humanity . The concept of deep time originated with the eighteenth - C Scottish geologist James Hutton , and was popularised by the American writer John McPhee in his book of account Basin and Range ( 1981 ) . For McPhee , the chief attraction of deep metre is its power to move us out of short - term thinking : ‘ If you release yourself from the conventional reaction to a amount like a million age , you absolve yourself a bit from the boundaries of human clock time , ’ he wrote . ‘ And then in a agency you do not live at all , but in another means you hold out constantly . ’
The workings of abstruse time are evident everywhere in Svalbard . In the 24-hour interval prior to my sojourn to the seed vault , I was out on the open seas with two dozen other artists and writer , travelling around the bound of Svalbard in a three - masted magniloquent ship . We ’d worked our way up the westerly coast of Spitsbergen , the archipelago ’s largest island , dip into the northerly fjords before head back . Again and again , I was impressed by the sheer still of the populace around us . Aside from a few failed attempts by whalers , there were no lasting human settlements in Svalbard before the late nineteenth hundred , and there is no autochthonous universe here , make unnecessary the reindeer and the bear . We sailed around Svalbard ’s edge at the height of the tourist season , and we sometimes die for days without seeing another ship .
Though we were good from from immediate harm , it was less clear whether there was a long - term menace in all that floating ice . Svalbard contain less than three per centime of the major planet ’s glacier , but those glacier are getting 60 - 70 mm thinner each year , and per year they sum 13 three-dimensional km of icemelt to the sea , raising it by .035 mm per year . None of this is lilliputian , but neither is it especially seeable or striking . When I come back home , a few people asked me if I ’d seen grounds of worldwide thawing . It was a well - entail query , but one that made little sensation . What would grounds of change look like to a person who ’d just arrived in a strange situation ? How could I tell what was steady snowmelt , and what was some subtle clue of a catastrophic ecosystem failure ? Anyone bear an on - demand Hollywood apocalypse will be disappointed up here .
‘ A glacier is an archivist and historiographer , ’ Gretel Ehrlich publish in The future tense of Ice ( 2004 ) . ‘ It saves everything no matter how small or big , including pollen , dust , heavy metals , bug , castanets , and minerals . It registers every fluctuation of weather … A glacier is metre embodied . ’ The time incarnated by a glacier operates on a very dissimilar scale , doled out in measurements far too small for humankind to find .
Sometimes what seems like a panic pant for breathing spell is something else solely . The lesson of Svalbard are more complex than the simple , immediate apocalypse intimated by the hoopla ring the seed bank vault . Cary Fowler , its former director , has hinted that the bank vault ’s real work will be more prosaic than the dominant narrative might run you to believe .
This article has been excerpted with license from Aeon Magazine . To read in its totality , head here .
Aeon is a new digital magazineof ideas and culture , publishing an original essay every weekday . It sets out to liven up conversations about worldviews , commission o.k. author in a range of genre , including memoir , science and social reportage .
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