The Norwegian government finally announced plans this week to build a Global Seed Vault, a seed bank that's been in the works for more than a year. The seed vault will be built on the Norwegian island of Svalbard, which lies 600 miles from the North Pole, and will be designed to protect the world's crop seeds in case of some sort of global catastrophe that destroys all agriculture. Seed banks already exist in several locations around the world, but this one aims to be a back-up in case all those others are also destroyed by this nameless global catastrophe.

The vault, a projust of the Global Crop Diversity Trust will have space for three million seeds, which will be stored at a temperature of 40 degrees below zero. Because of Svalbard's icy-cold climate, the logic goes, even if something happened to the vault's refrigeration system, the seeds would still remain frozen.

Interestingly, though, according to recent climate modeling, Svalbard looks set to warm more than anywhere else in Europe. RealClimate recently posted data on Svalbard that show the island just experienced its warmest winter since record-keeping began. According to the data, which RealClimate calls "fairly remarkable," the average temperature in April this year was so far above normal that it is, statistically speaking, "astronomically improbable." While temperatures were still several degrees C below freezing, it kinda makes you wonder whether this seed bank will be safe from global warming - which is one of the "catastrophes" for which the whole thing is presumably designed.

Photo credit: Global Geografia