Hidden beneath the Arctic, a Noah’s Ark for Plant Life

A polar bear sculpture made of ice stands outside the 

Global Seed Vault entrance in Longyearbyen.

 Bob Strong/Reuters

Tucked in a mountain on a remote Arctic island, beneath several hundred feet of rock and a near-constant blanket of snow, two imposing steel doors lock out the wind and bitter cold.

Behind them, a long tunnel leads to a series of quiet, concrete rooms. Austere fluorescent bulbs illuminate thousands of black boxes crowded upon row after row of shelves, each box packed to the brim with dozens of heat-sealed silver packets.

In each packet is a handful of sleeping seeds — the last-resort guarantors of the future of our food.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in 2008 as a ‘‘backstop’’ for seed banks around the world, in case their own archives of agricultural heritage are threatened by disaster. Isolated by miles of sea and acres of forbidding ice from the specter of earthquakes, heat waves, and human menace, the vault and its contents will last 1,000 years.

It’s a sort of Noah’s Ark for plants, built to withstand the events (wars, crop-disease, climate change, asteroid impacts) that might wipe a species from the rest of the planet.

But just seven years after the vault’s steel doors first opened, admitting contributions from seed banks around the world into the frozen sanctuary, 130 of the boxes are being recalled.

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They belong to the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (or ICARDA), which until two years ago stored thousands of seeds in a vault in Aleppo, Syria, according to Reuters.

The ICARDA center, like so many other important institutions in the civil war-ravaged nation, was displaced by the conflict, and, in the process, 325 boxes of duplicate seeds were sent to Svalbard for safekeeping. Now resettled in Beirut, the organization wants some of its samples back.

Though often described as a ‘‘doomsday’’ vault, a bulwark of biodiversity to protect global famine, the Svalbard bank was actually made for this kind of smaller withdrawal. In fact, the former Global Crop Diversity Trust executive director Cary Fowler, who now serves as a senior adviser helping care for the vault, bristled at the ‘‘doomsday’’ description.

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