Virtual Biobank

The World Seed Bank on the island of Svalbard has been supplemented with the Doomsday Library

Marina Astvatsaturyan, Echo of Moscow

The World Bank, a repository of planting material for all agricultural plants existing in the world, was opened under the auspices of the UN in February 2008 in Svalbard in the Norwegian village of Longyearbyen, just a thousand kilometers from the North Pole. The bank was created in order to prevent the complete destruction of seeds of plants of economic importance in the event of global catastrophes, such as the fall of an asteroid, nuclear war or global warming, and therefore the project received the unofficial – media – name "Doomsday Repository". Svalbard was chosen because of permafrost and low tectonic activity in the archipelago area. The storage facility is a system of tunnels located at a depth of 120 to 300 meters on the site of abandoned coal mines. They are equipped with explosion-proof doors and airlock chambers. Seed samples are stored in an aluminum foil wrapper. The preservation of biological material is ensured by permafrost, and additional lowering of the storage temperature to -18 ° C is provided by refrigeration units capable of operating on local coal. Each country has its own compartment in the world seed storage. On March 27 of this year, a library was opened next to the World Seed Bank -a digital archive of worldwide data on valuable genetic material stored in the neighborhood.

The new repository, which was called the Arctic World Archive, has an analog data storage method with a high-tech security system. While digital data is stored as discrete ones and zeros, analog data is a continuous recording of physical signals, like a vinyl record, the grooves and protrusions of which are transformed into music thanks to the needle of the player, explains Live Science. In the Arctic archive, "digital data is stored recorded on a photosensitive film," said Rune Bjerkestrand, founder of the Norwegian technical company Piql and project manager, in a comment to the publication. According to him, the data is mainly presented on the film in the form of large QR codes.

Piql company, established in 2002, is engaged in the conversion of digital data into analog. The saved data will be sent to film recording specialists in the same way as it is done when sending data to a printer using a secure IT data transmission infrastructure. Once printed, physical rolls of film cannot be edited, and they cannot be hacked like digital data. As Bjerkestrand says, the film data is "as if carved in stone."

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  10.04.2017