An Arctic ‘doomsday vault’ aimed at providing mankind with food in case of a global catastrophe will be designed to sustain the effects of climate change, the project’s builders said as they unveiled the architectural plans. The top-security repository, carved into the permafrost of a mountain in the remote Svalbard archipelago near the North Pole, will preserve some three million batches of seeds from all known varieties of the planet’s crops. The hope is that the vault will make it possible to re-establish crops obliterated by major disasters. ‘We have taken into consideration the (outside) temperature rising and have located the facility so far inside the rock that it will be in permafrost and won’t be affected’ by the outside temperature, Magnus Bredeli Tveiten, project manager at Norway’s Directorate of Public Construction and Property, told AFP. Construction on the seed bank, also dubbed the ‘Noah’s Ark of food’, will begin in March. The seed samples, such as wheat and potatoes, will be stored in two chambers located deep inside a mountain, accessed by a 120-meter (395-foot) tunnel. The tunnel and vaults will be excavated by boring and blasting techniques and the rock walls sprayed with […]