This week sees the formal opening of a vault designed to protect and preserve samples of valuable seeds from around the world. The "Doomsday" vault in Svalbard, Norway can store more than four million batches of seeds, including the world's major crop varieties. Although the vault cut into the side of a mountain is dubbed “Doomsday”, Norwegian scientists described it more as a "backup collection" in case some of the world's 1,400 gene banks are destroyed, anticipating any potentially disastrous situations in the earth’s future. The vault is located in a highly secured, mile deep tunnel on a remote island near the North pole.