Featured Image Credit: Credit: NordGen / The Crop Trust
A 'doomsday' vault, which often pops up in internet conspiracy theories and is co-owned by the Norwegian government, is now open for the public to have a look around.
Well, it's not like many of us will be able to go to the remote vault's location - it lies on a mountainside on Spitsbergen, in Norway's Svalbard archipelago.
Instead, members of the public are able to take a look inside this mysterious building thanks to a virtual tour - and you’ll never believe what’s inside.
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The Svalbard Global Seed Vault contains a whopping 1,214,827 seed samples from countries all over the world, and it's so vast it's said to have space for millions more.
According to the non-profit Crop Trust, the aim of the vault is to 'safeguard as much of the world’s unique crop genetic material as possible' - protecting different crop species from being permanently wiped out after events like natural catastrophes or war.
It first opened in 2008, after the Aleppo seed bank was destroyed in the Syrian civil war, and accepts new deposits three times a year.
Particularly as climate change threatens different plant species, it's going to become more vital than ever in the coming years.
The vault, in the Norwegian Arctic, is closed to the public and is often featured in internet doomsday conspiracy theories as people have wondered what really might be down there.
But, for its 15th anniversary, you can join a virtual tour to see the inside of the vault, buried deep in the mountain behind five sets of metal doors.
The tour takes you down a long tunnel and you eventually arrive at three seed chambers, each storing nearly 3,000 seed boxes which are sealed in an aluminum airtight bag and organized by country.
You can then click on each country and learn more about its agriculture.
The vault is designed to last forever - and the seeds are meant to be safe, because they are buried so deep in the permafrost - but even Svalbard isn't immune to the changes in weather.
In 2017, the entrance to the vault was flooded after a heatwave melted surrounding ice - but luckily the seeds weren't harmed.
But just in case, samples are replaced every few decades. And just to give you a real insight into how cold it is up there, if the air con - currently set at -18C - ever did fail, it would reportedly take hundreds of years for the temperature inside to rise above zero.
