Visiting Svalbard: Humanity's Cold Storage
The most northern located city in the world is Longyearbyen. It sits on the island of Spitsbergen in Svalbard, about $1,300 \text{ km}$ from the North Pole. Longyearbyen isn’t just a random remote arctic town. It’s one of the few places on Earth that combines permafrost, geological stability, political neutrality and extreme isolation. This unique combination makes it a very fitting place for some facilities… The Doomsday Vault Meet the most famous facility in Longyearbyen, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It is a global backup of the world’s crop diversity. The vault stores over $1 \text{ million}$ seed samples from almost every country on Earth. The seeds are stored deep inside a mountain, frozen naturally by permafrost, keeping seeds frozen even without electricity. This vault keeps the seeds, our most precious resource on earth, far from anything that can harm them. If anything happens to the entirety humanity, then our best odds to restore humanity are the seeds from the a...