Stepping off the plane onto the runway, I was greeted by horizontal winds and a ring of mountains towering overhead. I had landed in Svalbard, Norway, an Arctic desert island located halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. Once I gathered my bearings, I found my way inside to meet my host for the next four days. Åsmund Asdal, Coordinator of Operation and Management, Svalbard Global Seed Vault, kindly invited me to stay with his team in their guesthouse in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Located at 78°N, Svalbard is one of the northernmost permanently inhabited places in the world. I was fascinated to learn about the development of this isolated and remarkable terrain. Since its discovery in the 16th century, Svalbard has been home to only a few temporary settlers, mainly interested in whaling and trapping. However, industrialization began around 1900 as coal mines were established. Interestingly, not until the creation of the Svalbard Treaty in 1920 was the area ruled by any governing body. The Svalbard Treaty grants Norway sovereignty over Svalbard, ensures the territory not be involved in war, and allows signatory countries rights to economic resources on Svalbard. With only 2600 permanent residents, the effects of this unusual and recent development of the region are tangible even today. There are no proper hospitals, so pregnant women must fly to the mainland to give birth; people are not allowed to die and be buried on Svalbard, because the soil is permafrost and a body will not decompose; the average length of residency on Svalbard is six years, and there are more polar bears on Svalbard than there are people. This lack of expansion combined with such a drastic and harsh climate makes Svalbard nearly inhospitable, but also makes it the perfect home for the Global Seed Vault. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was established in 2008 by the Government of Norway. Broadly speaking, the purpose of a seed bank is to store plant material and seeds in order to preserve biodiversity against crises such as climate change and war. The Svalbard Seed Vault preserves in long-term storage the duplicates of seeds conserved in gene banks of crop or crop-related species. The facility is built into the side of a mountain, deep in the permafrost. While Svalbard may seem too isolated a location for such sophisticated machinery, it was actually chosen to ensure the vault could withstand any possible conditions or climatic changes. It is commonly referred to as the ‘Noah’s Ark of seeds’. Seeds in long term storage must be frozen to ensure their viability. The surrounding permafrost creates a constant temperature of -4°C, and so will protect seed survival if ever the building were to lose power. The vault is located high above sea level and if even all current glaciers were to melt would remain above sea level. Furthermore, given that Svalbard is not legally allowed to participate in war, it is safe from civil unrest. At first glance, this may all seem a little overdone – it’s just to store some seeds, right? In fact, according to Åsmund, “if all seed samples in the Vault were lost, it would cost 5 billion NOK, [or 778 million CAD], just to regrow and send the seeds”. This figure does not take into account the actual value of these seeds to countries that may rely on them for agriculture. The Seed Vault has the capacity to hold 4.5 million seed samples and currently houses over one million accessions of more than 5000 different plant species. This magnificent, state of the art facility is almost entirely underground and the door poking out of the mountain is perhaps a little underwhelming. Åsmund captured this sentiment well when he remarked, “well, it’s just an ordinary room, but holds extraordinary content”. There are seeds held in the vault from North Korea; due to the civil war in Syria, the International Centre for Agricultural Resources in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), headquartered in Syria, has made a withdrawal from their collection in the Global Seed Vault to restore local crops. These seeds are vital to the preservation of many of the world’s crops and stored at Svalbard will survive well beyond any of us alive today.