the.com/seed bank
Noah's Ark for plants, minus the rain and the drama.
means A secure storage facility that preserves seeds from many plant varieties as a backup against extinction, crop failure, or disaster.
from A straightforward compound: 'seed' (Old English 'sæd', from a Germanic root meaning that which is sown) plus 'bank' in its sense of a place where valuable things are deposited for safekeeping — the same metaphor as a blood bank or a bank of money. The financial sense of 'bank' itself traces back to Italian 'banca', the moneylender's bench. The idea of large-scale institutional seed banking took shape in the 20th century, as scientists recognized that crop diversity was vanishing and needed a vault, not just a field.
- svalbard vault
- buried in arctic permafrost for doomsday backup
- capacity
- holds millions of seed samples from across the globe
- cold storage
- kept near freezing to pause aging for decades
- funding source
- partly bankrolled by the bill gates foundation