Engineers last week finished work on one of the world's most ambitious conservation projects: a doomsday vault carved into a frozen mountainside in the archipelago of Svalbard, a few hundred miles from the North Pole. Over the next few weeks, the huge cavern - backed by the Norwegian government and the Gates Foundation - will be filled with more than a million types of seed and will be officially opened in February next year.

'This will be the last refuge for the world's crops,' said Cary Fowler, of the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is building the vault. 'There are seed banks in various countries round the globe, but several have been destroyed or badly damaged in recent years. We need a place that is politically and environmentally safe if we are going to feed the planet as it gets hotter.'

About 500 seeds from about 1.5 million types of crop - donated by individual countries - will be placed in envelopes and about 400-500 of these envelopes are stored in a single box. Boxes will then be stacked like library books along shelves inside the vaults.

这是世界上最宏伟的保护工程之一：在距离北极几百英里的斯瓦尔巴群岛一个冰冻的山坡上开凿一个世界末日储藏室。工程师们已在上周完成了相关工作。今后几周，这个巨大的洞穴将装满100多万种种子，并将在明年2月正式开放。开凿这个储藏室得到了挪威政府和盖茨基金会的支持。

建造这个储藏室的是总部设在罗马的全球农作物多样化基金会。该基金会的卡里·福勒说：“这将是世界农作物最后的避难所。世界上许多国家都有种子库，但是有几个种子库近年来遭到了毁坏或严重破坏。随着气候变暖，如果我们想养活地球人，我们就需要一个在政治上和环境上安全的地方。”

据悉，个别国家捐赠的大约150万种农作物的种子将被装在信封里，而大约400到500个这样的信封被贮存在一个箱子里。然后，箱子将像图书馆里的书籍一样，被堆放在储藏室里的货架上。