Happy Friday!
I hope that you also had a great week!
My neighborhood book club met on Wednesday evening to discuss Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy. Set in a fictitious tiny island between Australia and Antarctica, there are five main characters plus the island, which plays a big part in the book. A widowed man and his three children live there in a lighthouse, basically in isolation, except for his work and the internet. A woman washes up on shore, barely alive and injured after her boat is destroyed in a storm; the person taking her to the island died in the accident. Another adult is revealed toward the end. Lastly, the island with its dangerous weather, the ocean, flora, fauna, seals, penguins and birds (including albatross). The book was captivating, albeit a little dark.
What was the family doing for years on a dangerous, lonely island? The father supervised a small group of scientists in a seed repository. They collected, catalogued and stored seeds to prevent them from extinction and secure food supplies in case of a cataclysmic disaster. As the ocean waters rose over the island, their collection was in peril.
While Shearwater Island was fiction, it was modeled after Macquarie Island, a subantarctic island halfway between Tanzania and Antarctica, 21.7 miles (35 km) long and 3 miles (5 km) wide. The average temperatures range from 3˚to 7˚C (upper 30s F) with winds up to 170 km (110 miles)/hr. Prior to writing the book, the author traveled there with her partner and one-year-old baby to see what it was like.
Initially, the island provided the first radio link between Australia and Antarctica during Sir Douglas Mawson's 1911 expedition. It became a wildlife sanctuary in 1933 and a World Heritage site in 1997. The Macquarie Island Research Station is part of the Australian Antarctic Program, established in 1948. The research station is focused on conservation, environmental and climate research projects. The facility is deteriorating due to the extreme weather and the Australian government committed $370 million over 9 years for new construction, anticipated to be completed in 2032.
Over 1700 gene banks worldwide have collections of food crops for safekeeping. The architype for the book was the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located deep in a Norwegian arctic mountain in Norway and owned by Norway. While photos of Macquarie Island show lush greenery, Svalbard is water, mountains and snow. It is the farthest north a person can fly on a scheduled flight (on Scandinavian Airlines and Norwegian Air Shuttle, in case you'd like to book a ticket). Sometimes referred to as the "doomsday" vault, it stores duplicates of seed samples from around the world, in case of a natural disasters, war and avoidable disasters such as a poorly functioning freezer. It also breeds plants capable of surviving changes in climate.
The seeds are stored at -18˚C (0.4˚F) in custom-made three-ply foil packages which are sealed inside boxes. Permafrost (ground or rock that remains completely frozen at or below 0˚C or 32˚F for at least two consecutive years) and thick rock can keep the samples frozen even without power. The seed vault storage capacity is 4.5 million varieties of crops, a maximum of 2.5 billion seeds, the most diverse collection of food crop seeds in the world. The Cherokee Nation became the first indigenous group from North America to deposit seeds from 9 heirloom crops that predate European Colonization in 2020. Seeds can only be withdrawn by the depositors.
The National Laboratory for Genetic Resource Preservation Seed Program in Ft. Collins, Colorado (the largest in the U.S.) uses conventional storage (-18˚C) and cryogenic storage using liquid nitrogen (-196˚C; -160˚C in the vapor phase) to store over half a million seed accessions across 10,000 species, including crops, grains, nuts, fruits, ornamental plants and crop wild relative species (a wild plant closely related to a domesticated plant).
This was all news to me but it's reassuring to know that safeguards are in place around the world. Many botanical gardens also operate seed banks. There may be one near you that you are completely unaware of!
Have a fantastic weekend! The World Cup Final is on Sunday at New York New Jersey Stadium. Sad about my home team, but congratulations to Spain and Argentina for making it to the top – this should be a great game! There has been such great energy around FIFA for the past month. It is really an amazing phenomenon to experience and I'm so happy that the U.S. was a host this year.
Cheers,
Deb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTYREFIOijM