Download or read book Seeds on Ice Svalbard and the Global Seed Vault written by Cary Fowler and published by Prospecta Press. This book was released on 2024-04-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The remarkable story of the Global Seed Vault--and the valiant effort to save the past and the future of agriculture: Now updated with a new chapter by the author and photos from recent improvements in the facilities. Closer to the North Pole than to the Arctic Circle, on an island in a remote Norwegian archipelago, lies a vast global seed bank buried within a frozen mountain. At the end of a 130-meter long tunnel chiseled out of solid stone is a room filled with humanity's precious treasure, the largest and most diverse seed collection ever assembled: more than a half billion seeds containing the world's most prized crops, a safeguard against catastrophic starvation. The Global Seed Vault, a visionary model of international collaboration, is the brainchild of Cary Fowler, renowned scientist, conservationist, and biodiversity advocate. In SEEDS ON ICE, Fowler tells for the first time the comprehensive inside story of how the "doomsday seed vault" came to be, while the breathtaking photographs offer a stunning guided tour not only of the private vault, but of the windswept beauty and majesty of Svalbard and the enchanting community of people in Longyearbyen. With growing evidence that unchecked climate change will seriously undermine food production and threaten the diversity of crops around the world, SEEDS ON ICE offers a personal and passionate reminder that we shouldn't take our reliance on the world of plants for granted--and that, in a very real sense, the future of the human race rides on this frozen and indispensable biodiversity.
Download or read book The Vault of Svalbard written by Michela Arturina Betta and published by Austin Macauley Publishers. This book was released on 2022-10-31 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The vault of Svalbard, the global seed bank, has been robbed and its irreplaceable content stolen. The theft becomes a priority case for the Global Agency for Informed Consent (GAIC). As the agency’s director, Achilles is in charge of the investigation into the disappearance of the seeds. Suspicions first fall on the Earth Movement and its music band Save the Earth, because of their radical position on climate change and food shortages. Unpredictable circumstances though take the investigation to the Sahara Desert controlled by the Confederation of the Tuaregs. The theft of the seeds is the first episode in a series of adventures that involve a mysterious small chamber hidden in the vault of Svalbard. When Achilles and its team eventually enter the chamber, its secret is finally unveiled. The chamber contains a jar full of water. Some say that it has healing powers. Others claim that it never evaporates hence one single drop could quench a person’s thirst forever. Is it is new water? Should the jar be removed from the vault? How can such water be protected from the grabbing hands of a thirsty humanity? Two dramatic events now happen. The seeds are returned undamaged and a moving glacier destroys the vault of Svalbard. Achilles suspects that somebody removed the jar before the destruction. But where is it now, the water jar? The mystery surrounding the precious water stretches from the North Pole to the South Sahara and is resolved in the last pages of the story.
Download or read book Seeds on Ice written by Cary Fowler and published by Prospecta Press. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The remarkable story of the Global Seed Vault—and the valiant effort to save the past and the future of agriculture Closer to the North Pole than to the Arctic Circle, on an island in a remote Norwegian archipelago, lies a vast global seed bank buried within a frozen mountain. At the end of a 130-meter long tunnel chiseled out of solid stone is a room filled with humanity’s precious treasure, the largest and most diverse seed collection ever assembled: more than a half billion seeds containing the world’s most prized crops, a safeguard against catastrophic starvation. The Global Seed Vault, a visionary model of international collaboration, is the brainchild of Cary Fowler, renowned scientist, conservationist, and biodiversity advocate. In SEEDS ON ICE, Fowler tells for the first time the comprehensive inside story of how the “doomsday seed vault” came to be, while the breathtaking photographs offer a stunning guided tour not only of the private vault, but of the windswept beauty and majesty of Svalbard and the enchanting community of people in Longyearbyen. With growing evidence that unchecked climate change will seriously undermine food production and threaten the diversity of crops around the world, SEEDS ON ICE offers a personal and passionate reminder that we shouldn’t take our reliance on the world of plants for granted—and that, in a very real sense, the future of the human race rides on this frozen and indispensable biodiversity.
Download or read book Shattering written by Cary Fowler and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was through control of the shattering of wild seeds that humans first domesticated plants. Now control over those very plants threatens to shatter the world's food supply, as loss of genetic diversity sets the stage for widespread hunger. Large-scale agriculture has come to favor uniformity in food crops. More than 7,000 U.S. apple varieties once grew in American orchards; 6,000 of them are no longer available. Every broccoli variety offered through seed catalogs in 1900 has now disappeared. As the international genetics supply industry absorbs seed companies—with nearly one thousand takeovers since 1970—this trend toward uniformity seems likely to continue; and as third world agriculture is brought in line with international business interests, the gene pools of humanity's most basic foods are threatened. The consequences are more than culinary. Without the genetic diversity from which farmers traditionally breed for resistance to diseases, crops are more susceptible to the spread of pestilence. Tragedies like the Irish Potato Famine may be thought of today as ancient history; yet the U.S. corn blight of 1970 shows that technologically based agribusiness is a breeding ground for disaster. Shattering reviews the development of genetic diversity over 10,000 years of human agriculture, then exposes its loss in our lifetime at the hands of political and economic forces. The possibility of crisis is real; this book shows that it may not be too late to avert it.
Download or read book Archiving Eden written by and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spurred Spurred by the impending completion of the Svarlbard Global Seed Vault, Archiving Eden explores the role of seed banks and their preservation efforts in the face of climate c hange, the extinction of natural species, and decreased agricultural diversity. Serving as a global botanical backup system, these privately and publicly funded institutions assure the opportunity for the reintroduction of species should a catastrophic event or civil strife affect a key ecosystem somewhere in the world. Since 2008, Dornith Doherty has worked in collaboration with renowned biologists at the most comprehensive international seed banks in the world: the United States D epartment of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service's National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Colorado, USA, the Millennium Seed Bank, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the UK.; and PlantBank, Threatened Flora Centre, and Kings Park Botanic G ardens in Australia. Utilising the archives' on - site X - ray equipment that is routinely used for viability assessments of accessioned seeds, Doherty documents and subsequently collages the seeds and tissue samples stored in these crucial collections. The am azing visual power of magnified X - ray images, which springs from the technology's ability to record what is invisible to the human eye, illuminates her considerations not only of the complex philosophical, anthropological, and ecological issues surrounding the role of science and human agency in relation to gene banking, but also of the poetic questions about life and time on a macro and micro scale. Doherty is struck by the power of these tiny plantlets and seeds (many are the size of a grain of sand) to g enerate life and to endure the time span central to the process of seed banking, which seeks to make these sparks last for two hundred years or more. Use of the colour delft/indigo blue evokes references not only to the process of cryogenic preservation, c entral to the methodology of saving seeds, but also to the intersection of East and West, trade, cultural exchange, and migration. This tension between stillness and change reflects her focus on the elusive goal of stopping time in relation to living mater ials, which at some moment, we may all want to do.
Download or read book Combating Global Warming written by Kodoth Prabhakaran Nair and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-03 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book critically examines the environmental hazards posed by global warming with regard to future food security, which will depend on a combination of stresses, both biotic and abiotic, imposed by climate change; variability of weather within a growing season; and the development of cultivars that are more sensitive to different ambient conditions. Furthermore, the ability to develop effective adaptive strategies which allow these cultivars to express their genetic potential under changing climate conditions will be essential. In turn, the book investigates those plant species which are very closely related to field crops and have the potential to contribute beneficial traits for crop improvement, e.g. resistance to a wide range of biotic and abiotic stresses, enriching the gene pool, and ultimately leading to enhanced plant yield, known as “Crop Wild Relatives” (CWRs). CWRs hold tremendous potential to sustain and enhance global food security, contributing to human well-being. Accordingly, their development, characterization and conservation in crop breeding programs have assumed great practical importance./div Professor Kodoth Prabhakaran Nair is an internationally acclaimed agricultural scientist, with over three decades of experience in Europe, Africa and Asia, holding some of the most prestigious academic positions, including the National Chair of the Science Foundation, The Royal Society, Belgium. A Senior Fellow of the world renowned Alexander von Humboldt Research Foundation of The Federal Republic of Germany, he is best known, globally, for having developed a revolutionary soil management technique, known as "The Nutrient Buffer Power Concept", which, while questioning the scientific fallacies of the highly soil extractive farming, euphemistically known as the "green revolution", has opened up an alternative path for sensible and scientific soil management
Download or read book Perishability Fatigue written by Vincent Bruyere and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Svalbard Global Seed Vault project is an arctic archive designed to preserve the world’s agricultural biodiversity. What do it and other novel forms of storage tell us about our relationship to the future in a time of resource depletion and extinction scenarios? In this innovative book, Vincent Bruyere offers an invitation to look at the present we live in through a fresh lens: the difference between storage and burial in the age of sustainability science. Perishability Fatigue considers questions of permanence and the potentiality of retrieval, noting the tensions within our collective sense of time and finitude. Bruyere reflects on the nature and significance of perishability, asking what it means to have one’s sense of temporality engendered by seed banks and frozen embryo storage, genetically modified organisms and the “de-extinction” of species, nuclear-waste repositories, oncology, and palliative care. He draws attention to the scripts and scenarios that mediate our relations to loss and decay, preservation and conservation, emphasizing the inequalities implicit in technologies of perishability, which promise continuity in the future to some while refusing it to others. A highly interdisciplinary study, Perishability Fatigue reframes the environmental humanities and humanistic inquiry into sustainability science by developing a new language to commemorate fatigue and transience in a culture of preparedness and survival.
Download or read book The Doomsday Key LP written by James Rollins and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-06-23 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Rollins, the New York Times bestselling master of nail-biting suspense and historical mystery, combines cutting-edge biotechnology with a centuries-old secret in an apocalyptic story that reveals where humankind is truly headed The Doomsday Key At Princeton University, a famed geneticist dies inside a biohazard lab. In Rome, a Vatican archaeologist is found dead in St. Peter's Basilica. In Africa, a U.S. senator's son is slain outside a Red Cross camp. The three murders on three continents bear a horrifying connection: all the victims are marked by a Druidic pagan cross burned into their fl esh. The bizarre murders thrust Commander Gray Pierce and Sigma Force into a race against time to solve a riddle going back centuries, to a ghastly crime against humanity hidden within a cryptic medieval codex. The fi rst clue is discovered inside a mummifi ed corpse buried in an English peat bog—a gruesome secret that threatens America and the world. Aided by two women from his past—one his exlover, the other his new partner—Gray must piece together the horrifying truth. But the revelations come at a high cost, and to save the future, Gray will have to sacrifi ce one of the women at his side. That alone might not be enough, as the true path to salvation is revealed in a dark prophecy of doom. Sigma Force confronts humankind's greatest threat in an adventure that races from the Roman Coliseum to the icy peaks of Norway, from the ruins of medieval abbeys to the lost tombs of Celtic kings. The ultimate nightmare is locked within a talisman buried by a dead saint—an ancient artifact known as the Doomsday Key.
Download or read book Where Our Food Comes From written by Gary Paul Nabhan and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-02-13 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The future of our food depends on tiny seeds in orchards and fields the world over. In 1943, one of the first to recognize this fact, the great botanist Nikolay Vavilov, lay dying of starvation in a Soviet prison. But in the years before Stalin jailed him as a scapegoat for the country’s famines, Vavilov had traveled over five continents, collecting hundreds of thousands of seeds in an effort to outline the ancient centers of agricultural diversity and guard against widespread hunger. Now, another remarkable scientist—and vivid storyteller—has retraced his footsteps. In Where Our Food Comes From, Gary Paul Nabhan weaves together Vavilov’s extraordinary story with his own expeditions to Earth’s richest agricultural landscapes and the cultures that tend them. Retracing Vavilov’s path from Mexico and the Colombian Amazon to the glaciers of the Pamirs in Tajikistan, he draws a vibrant portrait of changes that have occurred since Vavilov’s time and why they matter. In his travels, Nabhan shows how climate change, free trade policies, genetic engineering, and loss of traditional knowledge are threatening our food supply. Through discussions with local farmers, visits to local outdoor markets, and comparison of his own observations in eleven countries to those recorded in Vavilov’s journals and photos, Nabhan reveals just how much diversity has already been lost. But he also shows what resilient farmers and scientists in many regions are doing to save the remaining living riches of our world. It is a cruel irony that Vavilov, a man who spent his life working to foster nutrition, ultimately died from lack of it. In telling his story, Where Our Food Comes From brings to life the intricate relationships among culture, politics, the land, and the future of the world’s food.
Download or read book Doctor Who The Secret in Vault 13 written by David Solomons and published by Random House Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In celebration of the first female Doctor Who in history and the new TV series airing October 7, 2018! Bestselling author David Solomons delivers a super smart and vibrant new heroine in an original adventure bursting with action and humor. The Doctor has never faced a challenge quite like this. A sinister school where graduation means death . . . A monstrous mystery lurking beneath a quiet London street . . . A desperate plea for help delivered by . . . Hang on. A potted plant? The Doctor has been summoned. The galaxy is in terrible danger, and only a Time Lord can save it. But to do so, she must break into the ancient Galactic Seed Vault. And at its heart lies a secret: Vault 13. The Vault has remained unopened for millions of years and is located on a remote and frozen world--from which nobody has ever returned alive. . . . Can the Doctor and her friends Yaz, Ryan, and Graham uncover the shocking secret in Vault 13?
Download or read book A Woman in the Polar Night written by Christiane Ritter and published by Greystone Books. This book was released on 2010-04-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this extraordinary adventure, a reluctant visitor to the Arctic thrives in the awesome and unforgiving landscape. In 1933, Christiane Ritter, a painter from Austria, travelled to Spitsbergen, an Arctic island north of Norway, to be with her husband. He had been taking part in a scientific expedition and stayed on to hunt and fish. “Leave everything as it is and follow me to the Arctic,” he wrote to his wife; but for Christiane, “as for all central Europeans, the Arctic was just another word for freezing and forsaken solitude. I did not follow at once.” Eventually she gave in, lured by his compelling stories about the remarkable wildlife and alluring light shows. She says: “They told of journeys by water and over ice, of the animals and the fascination of the wilderness, of the strange light over the landscape, of the strange illumination of one’s own self in the remoteness of the polar night. In his descriptions there was practically never any mention of cold or darkness, of storms or hardships.”
Download or read book Sword and Sonnet written by Aidan Doyle and published by . This book was released on 2018-07 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of fantasy and science fiction stories featuring battle poets
Download or read book The Vault at the Top of the World written by Map Resources Premier International and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Article about the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, which holds seeds and plants from all around the world safe from natural disaster or other forms of extinction. Details why the vault exists, how it was built, and how and when seeds are withdrawn.
Download or read book Arrival of the Fittest written by Andreas Wagner and published by Current. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Wagner draws on over fifteen years of research to present the missing piece in Darwin's theory. Using experimental and computational technologies that were heretofore unimagined, he has found that adaptations are not just driven by chance, but by a set of laws that allow nature to discover new molecules and mechanisms in a fraction of the time that random variation would take"--Amazon.com.
Download or read book The Pole Vault Toolbox written by Shawn Francis and published by . This book was released on 2019-12 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether you're a pole vaulter chasing personal records or a coach trying to coach them, The Pole Vault Toolbox is the blueprint. Shawn is a highly sought-after pole vault coach andeducator. In this book, he shares the tools that have helped thousands of coaches and their athletes vault personal records, break state records, win state medals, and received college scholarships. He breaks down his Master's Degree research on the pole vault and explains how he uses it today. Finally, he reveals the tricks he figured out as a professional pole vaulter, including how to overcome the fear of moving up to bigger poles or what to do if you struggle running through. Filled with his trademark humor, The Pole Vault Toolbox is invaluable for veterans in the sport as well as those who just picked up a pole for the first time. Often drawing from Shawn's personal and often humbling experiences.
Download or read book Global Undergrounds written by Carlos López Galviz and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rest your eyes long enough on the skylines of Delhi, Guangzhou, Jakarta—even Chicago or London—and you will see the same remarkable transformation, building after building going up with the breakneck speed of twenty-first-century urbanization. But there is something else just as transformative that you won’t see: sprawling networks of tunnels rooting these cities into the earth. Global Undergrounds offers a richly illustrated exploration of these subterranean spaces, charting their global reach and the profound—but often unseen—effects they have on human life. The authors shine their headlamps into an astonishing diversity of manmade underground environments, including subway systems, sewers, communications pipelines, storage facilities, and even shelters. There they find not only an extraordinary range of architectural approaches to underground construction but also a host of different cultural meanings. Underground places can evoke fear or hope; they can serve as sites of memory, places of work, or the hidden headquarters of resistance movements. They are places that can tell a city’s oldest stories or foresee its most distant futures. They are places—ultimately—of both incredible depth and breadth, crucial to all of us topside who work as urban planners, geographers, architects, engineers, or any of us who take subway trains or enjoy fresh water from a faucet. Indeed, as the authors demonstrate, the constant flux within urban undergrounds—the nonstop circulation of people, substances, and energy—serves all city dwellers in myriad ways, not just with the logistics of day-to-day life but as a crucial part of a city’s mythology.
Download or read book The Last Forever written by Deb Caletti and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginnings and endings overlap in this soaring novel of love and grief from Printz Honor medal winner and National Book Award finalist Deb Caletti. Nothing lasts forever, and no one gets that more than Tessa. After her mother died, it’s all Tessa can do to keep her friends, her boyfriend, and her happiness from slipping away. And then there’s her dad. He’s stuck in his own daze, and it’s so hard to feel like a family when their house no longer seems like a home. Her father’s solution? An impromptu road trip that lands them in Tessa’s grandmother’s small coastal town. Despite all the warmth and beauty there, Tessa can’t help but feel even more lost. Enter Henry Lark. He understands the relationships that matter. And more importantly, he understands her. A secret stands between them, but Tessa’s willing to do anything to bring them together—because Henry may just be her one chance at forever.
