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Finally, a Peek Into the Arctic Seed Vault That Could Save Humanity – Mother Jones

The repository, designed to last forever, offers virtual tours for the first time.

By Patrick Greenfield, March 5, 2023

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

“It is a bit like being in a cathedral. It has high ceilings and when you’re standing inside the mountain, there’s hardly any sound.”NordGen

Jutting out of the permafrost on a mountainside on Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago, the entrance to the world’s “doomsday” seed vault is worthy of any James Bond movie.

Surrounded by snow, ice and the occasional polar bear, the facility houses 1.2 million seed samples from every corner of the planet as an insurance policy against catastrophe.

It is a monument to 12,000 years of human agriculture that aims to prevent the permanent loss of crop species after war, natural disaster or pandemic.

Source: Finally, a Peek Into the Arctic Seed Vault That Could Save Humanity – Mother Jones

Memories & History, Science & Health

Top-secret Cold War military project found perfectly preserved fossil plants under Greenland ice | Live Science

Frozen soil held plant fragments that may be a million years old.

By Mindy Weisberger – Senior Writer 3 days ago

Greenland’s ice sheet may have disappeared far more recently than once thought, enabling plants and trees to thrive. (Image credit: Joshua Brown/UVM)

Frozen soil that was collected in Greenland during the Cold War by a secret military operation hid another secret: buried fossils that could be a million years old. Recent analysis revealed plants that were so well-preserved they “look like they died yesterday,” researchers said.

U.S. Army scientists dug up the ice core in northwestern Greenland in 1966 as part of Project Iceworm, a covert mission to build a subsurface base concealing hundreds of nuclear warheads, where they would be within striking range of the Soviet Union. An Arctic research station named Camp Century was the Army’s cover story for the project. But Iceworm fizzled; the base was abandoned and the ice core lay forgotten in a freezer in Denmark until it was rediscovered in 2017.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/plants-under-greenland-ice.html