More than 268,000 samples containing about 100m seeds from almost every country of the world have been deposited in the new Svalbard Global Seed Vault inside the Arctic Circle.
Funded by the Norwegian government and supported by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the seed vault consists of three enormous caverns blasted 125m into the permafrost on the island of Spitzbergen, some 1000km north of the Norwegian mainland.
Pictures are credited to Mari Tefre and the Global Crop Diversity Trust