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In the punishing cold of an Arctic

mountain range in the Sal Bard Islands.

A gate leads to what is supposed to be.

the safest place on earth good thing

they bricked up the road scientists are

on their way

approaching through this isolated and

hostile terrain and I'm with them as

they carry a precious cargo of seeds to

be kept out of the way of whatever

climate change might bring I mean how

often do you get these deliveries as we

have delivered three times a year the

box of seeds is about to go through the

first line of security there are half a

dozen in all I've just come down the

access tunnel that's cut into the

mountain here this place is a hundred

and thirty metres above sea level

because if the worst happens and global

warming melts all of the polar ice caps

this project will still be safe because

this is the next stage the deeper inside

the mountain we go the more the

temperature drops the store is designed

to survive any natural disaster the

seeds can last here for a very long time

it depends on what crop it is but some

of the crops may survive for more than

4,000 years

you're really imagining this place

functioning keeping the seeds say for

4000 years well it's difficult to say

I'm sure that the pharaohs thought that

their pyramids would last long and they did the last barrier to the store itself okay inside here it's minus 18 Celsius the rows of shelves are filling up with seeds from all over the world there are

samples of nearly half of the most

important food crops brought here just

in case samples of seeds used to be held

in glass test tubes now they're kept in

little plastic packets and there are

more than 800,000 of these in this fault

and everywhere you look there are

examples of why this place matters there

are seeds from Syria plants that are

good at coping with drought and some

have just been returned to the Middle

East

when harvests are ruined by extremes of

weather having backup copies of key

seeds is essential

another threat is flooding which can

damage national stores of seeds this

happened in the Philippines and with

industrial scale farming most food comes

from just a dozen varieties of plants

so keeping different genetic types help

to guarantee supplies it is for the

survival mankind in the future I mean we

need the diversity all the different

kinds of plants material to get foods

for the future we have a lot of problems

seeing us now climate change

environmental problems and to tackle

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that we need a genetic variation so in

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these remote mountains this place is

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meant to be a safeguard against

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apocalypse an insurance policy for a

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warming world

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David truck Mont BBC news in Svalbard in

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the Arctic