THE DOOMSDAY VAULT

SCOTT PELLEY, co-host:

We're going to take you on a journey to the end of the Earth to show you a place that might some day save humankind. It's a bank built to last 10,000 years, but it's not money or gold that's on deposit. Currencies rise and fall with civilizations. We were there last month when the world's most important assets were made safe from climate change and nuclear war, locked deep inside the Doomsday Vault.

(Footage of coast; islands; graphic of earth; footage of snowmobilers; polar bear sign; reindeer; landscape; Cary Fowler with Scott Pelley)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) Head toward the top of the planet, over the freezing Arctic Ocean, and you'll a find a collection of ice-covered islands called Svalbard, Norwegian for "cold coast." They're due north of Europe, administered by Norway, and among the last bits of land before the North Pole. Down on the water is the northern most town in the world, Longyearbyen, with about 2,000 people; but polar bears outnumber the people, and reindeer outnumber everything. It's an otherworldly place, a twilight zone where sometimes the sun never rises and the moon never sets. In the dead of winter, it was the last stop in the 30-year journey of American scientist Cary Fowler.

PELLEY: It's a long way from the farm in Tennessee.

Mr. CARY FOWLER: It's a world away.

PELLEY: Did you ever worry that it wouldn't get this far?

Mr. FOWLER: I was worrying all the time, I think. But here we are.

(Footage of Pelley and Fowler walking to vault)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) From the outside, it looks like a concrete wedge pounded into a mountain. Walk through the door and cross from a hostile wasteland into a safe house for humanity.

Well, I've got to say, it looks like a doomsday vault.

Mr. FOWLER: It probably is one. At least we think if there are any big problems on the outside, this is going to survive.

(Footage of tunnel)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) This was clearly built to last.

Mr. FOWLER: We built this to last as long as we could imagine. I don't know what's in the minds of the people who built the pyramids. Maybe they were building to last forever, too. But I can't think of anything that's been built in our lifetime that's been built with this kind of time horizon.

PELLEY: And all these pipes over our heads?

Mr. FOWLER: That's the refrigeration units.

PELLEY: The refrigeration?

Mr. FOWLER: Yes.

PELLEY: We're 700 miles from the North Pole.

Mr. FOWLER: Yeah.

PELLEY: And you're air conditioning this place?

Mr. FOWLER: We're going to freeze it even further.

(Footage of Pelley and Fowler in tunnel; tunnel)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) Freeze it colder than the permafrost, so that if the earth warms and the power goes out, the vault will stay frozen for another 25 years.

Offscreen Voice: Two hundred. One hundred.

(Footage of landing strip; plane landing; people opening door; cargo; people unloading cargo; trucks)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) The treasures that the vault was built to house approach an air strip at the base of the mountain nearby. What's in these boxes took 10,000 years to develop and 70 years to collect. Now they were loaded for the last mile to Fowler's frozen Fort Knox.

(Footage of Pelley and Fowler entering room)

Mr. FOWLER: (Voiceover) This is the coldest place in the mountain. We wanted to take advantage of the naturally frozen temperatures down here, and we wanted absolutely the coldest spot we could find.

PELLEY: It is pretty cold down here.

Mr. FOWLER: It's cold. It's getting colder, actually.

These are airlock doors. It keeps the cold air in.

PELLEY: Wow.

Mr. FOWLER: It's pretty big.

PELLEY: So the foundation of humanity ends up here?

Mr. FOWLER: It's about 30 yards long, it's about 10 yards wide and five yards high.

(Footage of silver envelopes)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) Inside the boxes that came off the plane are millions of silver envelopes.

Show me what's inside.

Mr. FOWLER: OK, we'll take a look at these two. Of course, they're going to be sealed in the boxes, but here's one sample.

PELLEY: What are they?

Mr. FOWLER: Well, these are chickpeas. They're garbanzos. This is a crop you ought to know.

PELLEY: Wheat?

Mr. FOWLER: Wheat. Very good.

PELLEY: So what's in all these envelopes is...?

Mr. FOWLER: Seeds.

PELLEY: This is a giant vault built in the Arctic just to house seeds.

Mr. FOWLER: That's right. It's a seed bank.

(Footage of sign; man pulling cargo; Fowler and man carrying boxes; man pulling cargo; people working in fields)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) If you could clear away the ice, you'd see that officially the bank is called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Its built to warehouse backup copies of all the world's crops, 1 1/2 billion seeds, everything from California sunflowers to ancient Chinese rice. If an asteroid strikes the Earth, seeds to restart agriculture would come from here. But science fiction aside, the main purpose is to protect against a doomsday that is unfolding right now, because the plants we've been eating for 10,000 years are going extinct.

Mr. FOWLER: If you ask somebody how many kinds of apples are there, they're going to say, `Well, there's red, there's green, there's yellow, there's Macintosh, there's Golden Delicious.' They're going to give you an answer like that.

PELLEY: Maybe 25, I would guess.

Mr. FOWLER: Good guess. But, in fact, in the 1800s in the United States, people were growing 7,100 named varieties of apples, 7,100 different varieties of apples.

PELLEY: And how many are there today?

Mr. FOWLER: We've lost about 6,800 of those. So the extinction rate for apple varieties in the United States is about 86 percent.

(Footage of people working in fields; agribusiness field; wheat storehouse; Pelley with Mike Bonman)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) That pattern exists in all crops. Estimates are that every day one crop strain disappears. And here's why, seeds used to be passed down through families; but today, farmers are planting mass produced industrial seeds. The upside is more food, but the downside is that the family variety goes extinct. To understand the danger, we visited a US government storehouse in Idaho, where Mike Bonman watches over America's collection of wheat seeds.

Mr. MIKE BONMAN: Well, we have in this room more than 50,000 different what we call accessions or collections of wheat from around the world.

PELLEY: Fifty thousand different kinds of wheat?

Mr. BONMAN: Exactly.

PELLEY: I didn't know there were that many.

Mr. BONMAN: Yeah, it's a--I think most people would be surprised.

(Footage of Bonman looking at seed envelopes; photo of Jack Harlan; Bonman looking at envelope)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) Most countries collect seeds in banks for safekeeping. And for 110 years, the US Department of Agriculture has sent scientists called plant explorers to collect the seeds in these envelopes. If there's an Indiana Jones of plant explorers, his name was Jack Harlan, who made one of his greatest finds in the 1940s.

Mr. BONMAN: This is PI-178383.

PELLEY: This was a wild variety of wheat growing in Turkey.

Mr. BONMAN: An old farmer variety that had probably been grown there for thousands of years.

(Footage of PI-178383 seeds; people planting seeds)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) In the field it looked dreadful. Harlan wrote in his journal it was "hopelessly useless." Useless for food; but as it turned out, inside these seeds is a superhero for fighting wheat disease. Today the genes of humble PI-178383 are a foundation of agriculture, bred into much of the bread we eat.

Mr. BONMAN: That's why you have to collect everything, because just by looking at the material in a farmer's field, you might say, `That one's no good. Let's don't collect it.' But you can't anticipate what value that might have. There may be genes in that material that are going to be of immense value in the future.

This is an example of a rust on a--on a small grain--in this case, it's oat. And in each pustule, there are thousands and thousands of spores that are dispersed through the air and can infect other plants.

(Footage of diseased plant; men preparing seed envelopes; seed bank)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) In the past, plant diseases like this caused mass starvation. Think of the Irish potato famine. But today, scientists prevent famines by going through tens of thousands of plants, looking for genes to fight disease or drought or any other problem. Turns out some of the rarest and most valuable seeds come from some of the most unstable places.

There was an important seed bank in Afghanistan.

Mr. FOWLER: That's right. It's been destroyed in the chaos following the fighting there. It was looted and destroyed.

(Footage of men harvesting crops; men knocking down wall)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) The Afghan seeds were thrown away because the looters wanted the glass jars they were kept in. Much of Iraq's seed collection was lost in that war; and in the Philippines, a typhoon washed away part of an important rice bank.

Mr. FOWLER: Doomsday doesn't have to come in the form of an asteroid. Doomsday can come in the form of an equipment failure or mismanagement, just human mismanagement, or a lack of funding, or a typhoon or something like that. And those kinds of things are happening all the time.

PELLEY: And once that crop is lost?

Mr. FOWLER: It's lost. We'll never see it again, and any kind of characteristic that it might have had is gone. It's off the artist's palate; it's a color that we can't use anymore. It's--it may have the disease or pest resistance that we absolutely need to have to have a viable crop in the future. Gone.

(Footage of Fowler working; men unloading cargo; men transporting cargo; snow; snowmobilers)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) Fowler runs the Global Crop Diversity Trust, set up by the United Nations and Bioversity International. His safe house cost $9 million. Norway paid for construction, Bill Gates paid for the shipping. And seeds from nearly every nation are locked inside.

(Voiceover) Svalbard may seem a strange place to build an ark for plants. We went exploring by the only practical way to get around. The islands are a white desert, barren and chilled to 30 below zero.

We're just above 78 degrees north latitude, and the North Pole is just off this way about 700 miles. This is about all the light that you get during this time of year. The sun never comes up over the horizon in the wintertime. It's ironic that the world's agricultural heritage is being stored in a place with no agriculture at all. They don't even have trees on Svalbard.

(Footage of snowmobilers)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) But these mountains are just the place to save the resources of life itself, remote from nuclear war, from storms and rising seas.

Mr. FOWLER: These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine. And we now have, I think, kind of a perfect storm hitting agriculture.

(Footage of factories; David Battisti walking)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) That perfect storm is crop extinction, population growth and global warming. At the University of Washington, Professor David Battisti has calculated that in 100 years, farmers will face temperatures unlike any in human history, temperatures more like millions of years ago.

What were conditions like then?

Professor DAVID BATTISTI: Well let me describe it this way, you have crocodiles in Ellesmere Island, which is in the edge of the Arctic. You have palm trees in Wyoming.

(Footage of Battisti during interview; farmer working)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) Battisti's data come from the Nobel Prize-winning climate research of the UN. His work is funded by the National Science Foundation. Battisti projects that the droughts of the past will pale in comparison to what he believes is coming.

Mr. BATTISTI: If you think about the Dust Bowl in the US, and you think about, well, there was a decade where you had on the average of maybe 5 percent reduction in precipitation, you know, for the growing season. Southern California, the Caribbean, southern Europe, northern Africa, central Asia, all of these places, 100 years from now, will typically experience, on average, 20 to 30 percent reduction in precipitation. Right? So that's five times the Dust Bowl.

(Footage of Doomsday Vault; men carrying cargo; Fowler carrying box; tunnel)

PELLEY: (Voiceover) Whether it's a dry climate, a new virus or infestation, the genes to stop a famine may be in one of these boxes. When the last of the seeds descends the tunnel, the lights will go out, the vault will be locked, and Cary Fowler will have achieved his life's work: preserving civilization's past against an uncertain future.

Mr. FOWLER: If worst comes to worst, this does save the world; but it also has a more mundane feature to it, which is it helps us every day in feeding people.

(Footage of stopwatch)

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