Spitsbergen is a Norwegian island, the largest island of the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.
The name Spitsbergen means “jagged peaks” and was given by the Dutch explorer Willem Barents, who discovered the island while searching for the Northern Sea Route in 1596.
Approach to Longyearbyen
The Norwegian government has built a “doomsday” seed bank to store seeds from as many of the world’s plant species as possible. The bank was created by hollowing out a 120-meter tunnel on Spitsbergen cut into rock with a natural temperature of -6 degrees Celsius, refrigerating it to -18 degrees Celsius, and then storing seeds donated by the 1,400 crop repositories maintained by countries around the world. The vault has top security blast-proof doors and two airlocks. The number of seeds stored depends on the number of countries participating in the project, but the first seeds arrived late in 2007. The point of this project is to save plants (wild, agricultural, etc.) from becoming extinct as a side-effect of crop gene manipulation, or due to a global catastrophe such as climate change (the tunnel is 130 meters above sea-level) or nuclear war.
Global Seed Vault
Spitsbergen is today popular amongst tourists, and there are several scientists doing their research there.
Spitsbergen Warning
As Spitsbergen lies far within the arctic circle, the Sun is above the horizon for 24 hours a day from late April to late August. From 26 October to 15 February the Sun is continuously below the horizon, whilst from 12 November to the end of January there is civil polar night, where it is so continuously dark that artificial light must be used 24 hours each day. Below is a picture I took after we landed 00:30 am.
Parked at Longyearbyen airport
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