A frozen vault buried in the Arctic holds a backup of humanity's crops

Deep inside a mountain on the Norwegian island of Svalbard, the Global Seed Vault stores duplicate seed samples from gene banks worldwide, kept at minus 18 degrees Celsius by permafrost and mechanical cooling. Built to survive natural disasters, war and power failures, it opened in 2008 and now holds well over a million seed samples. It has already been used once, in 2015, to help restore a seed bank destroyed by Syria's civil war.

— NordGen / Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food, Svalbard Global Seed Vault — opened 2008