- A heatwave has produced record summer highs in Norway’s Svalbard, home to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
- Commonly referred to as the Doomsday Vault, the site houses nearly 900,000 seeds for research, breeding and educational purposes.
- Across the Arctic, climate change is taking its toll with rising temperatures thawing permafrost and melting sea ice.
What better place to build a Doomsday Vault than the remote, snow-covered islands of Norway’s Arctic Svalbard? Sitting around 1,000 kilometres from the North Pole, the facility is buried in permafrost to protect the precious seed samples housed there. But a freak heatwave is causing the region’s ice to melt.
