The Seed Vault at the End of the World

Deep inside a mountain on the Norwegian island of Svalbard, 1,300 kilometers from the North Pole, sits a concrete vault holding over 1. 2 million seed samples from nearly every country on earth. Walk through those frozen corridors and you'd find small foil packets containing what look like pebbles, dust, specks of nothing. Shriveled, brittle, unremarkable. But each seed carries a blueprint the naked eye cannot imagine.…