The Ark in the Ice

On a frozen island near the North Pole, drilled deep into the side of a mountain, there is a vault built to outlast us. Inside, behind blast doors and natural permafrost, sit nearly a million samples of seeds — duplicates of the crops the world grows, gathered from almost every country on Earth. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault: a backup copy of the food supply of the human species.

It exists for the day something goes wrong — a war, a blight, a collapse — that wipes out a crop or empties a nation's own seed stores. It has already been used: when the seed bank in Aleppo was destroyed in the Syrian war, researchers withdrew their backups from the Arctic and began again. A library of life, kept frozen in the dark at the edge of the habitable world, in case we ever have to start a harvest over.

The most ordinary thing — a banana, a grain of rice — turns out to be worth guarding like treasure at the end of the Earth.

And if we must hoard seeds against catastrophe — how close to the edge does our food really sit?