The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway is deep in the Arctic Circle; scientists there freeze and store millions of seeds—just in case any other seed vaults fail. Photo via iStock/Øyvind Breyholtz

History

Keeping Seeds Alive—in Case the World as We Know It Ends

A BU Arctic expert studies the remote Svalbard Global Seed Vault, where seeds are a symbol of scientific history and hope in a time of climate crisis

Adriana Craciun stood at the entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a towering rectangular doorway jutting out of a snowy mountain, in the cold twilight of winter. Just 800 miles away from the North Pole, Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago that sits deep in the Arctic Circle—the perfect place for freezing and storing seeds, and Craciun’s reason for being there. 

As the seconds ticked by, she worried about the possibility of encountering a polar bear—a situation that locals cautioned her about. Just then, the manager and founder of the seed vault opened the doors and waved her inside. This was the first of three visits she would make to Svalbard over the next 10 years, laying the foundation for her new book on the vault’s place in history. 

“It was a completely transformative experience being there,” says Craciun, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences professor and Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Chair of English. As a historian and expert on the Arctic, she became fascinated by Svalbard, which opened its doors in 2008 with the mission to safeguard the world’s most important crops by stockpiling millions of seeds from countries and cultures around the world. 

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault specifically preserves seeds that are already held in storage elsewhere, calling itself “the ultimate insurance policy for the world’s food supply,” just in case any of the other 1,700 seed banks around the world are lost or fail. The collections of seeds and the seeds’ genetic information are considered priceless resources for a planet experiencing a global climate crisis—one that threatens biodiversity and food security. Although seed vaults exist to protect us from a modern existential problem, Craciun sees them as a part of a much longer history of science. 

“To me, the seed vault is a creature of the Enlightenment era because global collections of seeds began to form in the 18th century. The difference now is that we’re thinking about the genes of the seeds,” she says. In her book, titled Arctic Enlightenment: The Time of Plants in the Global Seed Vault, forthcoming in 2025 from the University of Minnesota Press, she puts the Svalbard vault in context of a 300-year history studying and collecting seeds, and explores the meaning of protecting living collections for multiple generations. One area of focus is how the seed bank’s remote Arctic location, mission to prepare for the worst-case scenarios, and preservation of frozen seeds have fueled conspiracy theories and conjured images with a deep spiritual symbolism. 

Just one Google search will depict Svalbard Global Seed Vault as the “doomsday vault,” or a “modern Noah’s ark.” In an essay published in The Conversation last year, Craciun writes that “the vault has acquired a public meaning unlike that of any other seed bank.” For example, in 2022 a special delivery was made to the vault by UN Goodwill Ambassador and Lebanese athlete Michael Haddad, who journeyed to Svalbard on foot for over six months to enshrine a “package of hope” in the vault that included seed samples and a book by Pope Francis titled, Why Are You Afraid? Have You No Faith? This doesn’t typically happen at other seed bank locations.

“There’s a lot of interest in the seed vault that has nothing to do with seeds ultimately, but has to do with salvation,” Craciun says. “We’re under this intense climate crisis, and it’s become a place that is associated with hope.” 

The Magic of Seeds

There isn’t anything particularly special about the inside of the Svalbard seed vault—it’s a cavernous space, with large rooms full of shelves and boxes of dormant seeds. Several times a year, the doors are opened to depositors dropping off seeds. (The vault only offers virtual visits to the general public.) Since the beginning, the vault has amassed about 1.3 million samples with tens of thousands of crop varieties. 

“What struck me was how low-tech the vault is, given the high-tech nature of saving genetic resources,” Craciun says. The actual science of preserving seeds is quite simple—dried seeds are sealed in foil, placed inside boxes, and stored on shelves at -18 degrees Celsius (about -1 degrees Fahrenheit), which keeps the seeds in a prolonged state of dormancy. It’s assumed that these conditions will keep them alive for decades to centuries, but scientists don’t know exactly how long. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault launched an experiment in 2020 that involves testing barley, pea, wheat, and lettuce seeds every 10 years for the next 100 years to find more information about how long they stay viable.

These fundamental questions about the lifetime of a seed, Craciun says, are also the same questions her archival research has shown scientists were pondering 300 years ago. “Many people were asking those very questions in early science of plants in the 1700s and 1800s. Like, how long do these seeds live? How can we keep them alive longer? How do we pass on a living collection to the next generation?” she says. 

During her work on her book, she also discovered that scientists centuries before were not only pursuing cutting-edge science of the day, but also asking philosophical questions, like “What does this say about the meaning of life?” She says an early association of seeds being potentially immortal is still what draws people to the seed vault today.

“There’s something weird and strange about a seed that you can plant, and then next summer you’ll have another plant. There’s something magical about that to appreciate,” Craciun says. 

She argues that by preserving seeds, there are inseparable cultural, spiritual, and philosophical meanings being stored along with them. For example, in 2017, Quechua farmers from the Peruvian Andes deposited seeds of sacred potato varieties. The farmers said goodbye to the seeds with songs and prayer, referring to the sacred seeds as beloved family members. 

“Those values and attachments are preserved along with the seeds,” Craciun says. She returned to Svalbard in October 2023, her last trip before finishing the book, where she spoke to the staff members that ensure the facility continues to operate smoothly. While she was there, they were in the process of receiving an additional 11,000 seeds. This time, Craciun didn’t fear running into a bear, but she did feel a different sense of urgency. 

“I got the sense that the scientists there feel this huge responsibility to keep the seeds—and this sense of hope—safe,” she says. It’s a duty not only to preserve the future, but also one—as Craciun found time and time again in her research—rooted in history.