Norway Preserves World's Crop Seeds in Arctic Vault (Update1)
By Meera Bhatia and Alex Morales

Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Norway opened a ``Noah's Ark'' of seed samples in the Arctic to protect crops from extinction caused by pollution, natural disasters or climate change.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Nobel Prize- winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai placed the first seeds in the 50 million-krone ($9.3 million) underground complex on the island of Spitsbergen.

The vault can hold 4.5 million samples, or 2 billion seeds, and started with 268,000 samples comprising 100 million seeds, including potatoes, barley and wheat, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a United Nations-linked group that campaigned for its creation, said today.

``This is the first time the international community has taken a dramatic initiative to preserve crop diversity in perpetuity,'' the trust's executive secretary, Cary Fowler, said in a telephone interview from the site. ``That's important because crop diversity is absolutely essential to the survival of agriculture.''

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault features three caverns blasted 130 meters (426 feet) into the permafrost outside the village of Longyearbyen. The entire project was funded by the northern European nation, famous for fjords, pine-tree forests and ice-topped mountains.

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