Thousands Of Crop Varieties Depart For Arctic Seed VaultPackaging seeds. Thousands of Crop Varieties from Four Corners of the World Depart for Arctic Seed Vault. (Credit: CIMMYT, Mexico.) ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2008) — At the end of January, more than 200,000 crop varieties from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East—drawn from vast seed collections maintained by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)—will be shipped to a remote island near the Arctic Circle, where they will be stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), a facility capable of preserving their vitality for thousands of years. The...