On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 1:50 PM, Jim Reid <jim@rfc1035.com> wrote:
It's a bit like the Svalbard repository of most of the world's seeds: they're stored in a very safe place just in case there's a disaster and those crop seeds are *really* needed.
Having visited the Seed Vault (on my own, in permanent darkness, with a loaded WWII rifle which still had a swastika stamped into it, and an ice bear which roared on the slope behind me after an hour of me standing still and taking pictures in half a snow-storm; but that is another story), I have to disagree. The one is carved into bedrock, has double blast doors and two independent armoured storage chambers, is designed to withstand a nuclear explosion, be above the waterline even if the poles and glaciers melt down completely, and will remain cold enough for millennia to come even without active cooling and facing global warming. The other is just a place to store seeds. Richard