A “doomsday” seed vault built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters opened a few weeks ago. The seed vault is buried deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

This facility will serve as a backup for hundreds of other seed banks around the world. It has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the world and shield them from man-made and natural disasters.

“The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is our insurance policy,” Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates at the opening ceremony 130 metres underground (around 400 feet). “It is the Noah’s Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations.”

Dug into the permafrost of the mountain, it has been built to withstand an earthquake or a nuclear strike, said Kent Bradford, director of the Seed Biotechnology Center at U.C. Davis.

Many more details in this good Science Daily article

Government of Norway Press Release

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened February 26 on a remote island in the Arctic Circle, receiving inaugural shipments of 100 million seeds that originated in over 100 countries. With the deposits ranging from unique varieties of major African and Asian food staples such as maize, rice, wheat, cowpea, and sorghum to European and South American varieties of eggplant, lettuce, barley, and potato, the first deposits into the seed vault represent the most comprehensive and diverse collection of food crop seeds being held anywhere in the world.

The building of the vault itself has attracted much outside interest due to its location and its unusual engineering, security, and aesthetic features. Its engineering allows it to stay cool with only a single 10-kilowatt compressor, which is powered by locally generated electricity.

The vault consists of three highly secure rooms sitting at the end of a 125-metre tunnel blasted out of a mountain on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. The seeds will be stored at minus 18 degrees Celsius (minus 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and sealed in specially-designed four-ply foil packages. The packages are sealed inside boxes and stored on shelves inside the vault.

Each vault is surrounded by frozen arctic permafrost, ensuring the continued viability of the seeds should the electricity supply fail. The low temperature and moisture level inside the vaults will ensure low metabolic activity, keeping the seeds viable. If properly stored and maintained at minus 20 degrees Celsius (about minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit), some seeds in the vault will be viable for a millennium or more. For example, barley can last 2000 years, wheat 1700 years, and sorghum almost 20,000 years.

Anyone seeking access to the seeds themselves will have to pass through four locked doors: the heavy steel entrance doors, a second door approximately 115 metres down the tunnel and finally the two keyed air-locked doors. Keys are coded to allow access to different levels of the facility. Not all keys will unlock all doors. Motion detectors are set up around the site. Boxes of seeds inside the rooms are scanned before entering the seed vault.

A work of art also will make the vault visible for miles around. Artist Dyveke Sanne and KORO, the Norwegian agency overseeing art in public spaces, have worked together to fill the roof and vault entrance with highly reflective steel, mirrors, and prisms. The installation acts as a beacon, reflecting polar light in the summer months, while in the winter, a network of 200 fibre-optic cables will give the piece a muted greenish-turquoise and white light.

An amazing astronomy blog had some profound news in the last few days from NASA’s WMAP project.

WMAP Results

A lot of this information was determined a while back, just a couple of years after WMAP launched. But now they have released the Five Year Data, a comprehensive analysis of what all that data means. Here’s a quick rundown:

1) The age of the Universe is 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years. Some people might say it doesn’t look a day over 6000 years. They’re wrong.

2) The image above shows the temperature difference between different parts of the sky. Red is hotter, blue is cooler. However, the difference is incredibly small: the entire temperature range from cold to hot is only 0.0002 degrees Celsius. The average temperature is 2.725 Kelvin, so you’re seeing temperatures from 2.7248 to 2.7252 Kelvins.

3) The age of the Universe when recombination occurred was 375,938 years, +/- about 3100 years. Wow.

4) The Universe is flat.

5) The energy budget of the Universe is the total amount of energy and matter in the whole cosmos added up. Together with some other observations, WMAP has been able to determine just how much of that budget is occupied by dark energy, dark matter, and normal matter. What they got was: the Universe is 72.1% dark energy, 23.3% dark matter, and 4.62% normal matter. You read that right: everything you can see, taste, hear, touch, just sense in any way… is less than 5% of the whole Universe.

There are other important things that have come from the WMAP data, and if you’re interested, you can read all about them on the WMAP site and in the professional journal papers.

But if you only want to peruse the results I’ve highlighted here, that’s fine too. But remember this, and remember it well: you are living in a unique time. For the first time in all of human history, we can look up at the sky, and when it looks back down on us it reveals its secrets. We are the very first humans to be able to do this… and we have the entire future of the Universe ahead of us.

Professional Journal Papers: