Digital Identity February 15, 2023

GENESIS

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is located here the ultimate insurance policy for the world’s food supply, securing millions of seeds representing every important crop variety available in the world today and offering options for future generations to overcome the challenges of climate change and population growth. The seed vault was established so that genebanks worldwide could store duplicate samples of their seeds, and by this ensure that food crop varieties are not lost in local or global crises like war, terrorism or natural catastrophes.

Task

We were given the brief to design an identity for an island: Spitsbergen, Norway. It is the largest and only permanently populated island of the Svalbard archipelago. “Spitsbergen” meaning “pointed mountains” (from the Dutch spits — pointed, bergen — mountains), at first applied both to the main island and to the associated archipelago as a whole. Spitsbergen borders the Arctic Ocean, the Norwegian Sea, and the Greenland Sea.

Strategy

Identity, Branding

Svalbard consists of all the islands, islets and skerries between 74° and 81° north latitude and 10° and 35° east longitude. The High Arctic archipelago – roughly midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole – is full of contrasts and amazing nature-based experiences. The Arctic silence creates a unique atmosphere, and you will experience tranquillity that is virtually unrivalled anywhere else on earth. Majestic mountains, blue sea ice, almost never-ending glaciers and a rich animal life dominate the landscape, which changes appearance during our three main seasons; from the colourful tundra of the Polar Summer, via the spectacular light show of the Northern Lights winter to the frozen fjords and endless snowy landscape of the Sunny Winter.

The seasonal variations this far north are enormous – the long, dark season is replaced by bright winter months, which in turn are replaced by a surprisingly mild summer with sun 24/7.

At 74° north, the midnight sun lasts 99 days and polar night 84 days, while the respective figures at 81° north are 141 and 128 days. In Longyearbyen, midnight sun lasts from 20 April until 23 August, and polar night lasts from 26 October to 15 February. In winter, the combination of full moon and reflective snow can give additional light.

Due to the Earth’s tilt and the high latitude, Svalbard has extensive twilights. Longyearbyen sees the first and last day of polar night having seven and a half hours of twilight, whereas the perpetual light lasts for two weeks longer than the midnight sun. On the summer solstice, the sun bottoms out at 12° sun angle in the middle of the night, being much higher during night than in mainland Norway’s polar light areas. However, the daytime strength of the sun remains as low as 35°. Glacial ice covers 36,502 km2 or 60% of Svalbard; 30% is barren rock while 10% is vegetated.

The world’s largest secure seed storage can be found in the permafrost close to Longyearbyen. By storing the seeds in a location with permafrost you ensure that the seeds will stay frozen, even if a power cut should occur. In addition, Longyearbyen offers a stable political and geological location and well-established infrastructure – the seed storage is located only 1 kilometer from the local Svalbard airport.

The three rock vaults in the mountain base maintain a natural low temperature of 3 – 6 degrees Celsius below zero, but the vaults are cooled down further to 18 degrees Celsius below zero by a local power plant. The freezing temperatures stops the seeds from developing, delay seed aging and makes it possible to store seeds for many years. If needed the seeds will be thawed and they will again be active.

Svalbard Global Seed Vault was opened in February 2008 by the Norwegian government. The idea of creating a big, international seed storage was not new, already in 1984 a secure seed storage for Nordic seeds was established in Mine 3. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault now is a safe, free-of-charge, long-term storage of duplicates of seed samples stored in the world’s genebanks. It contributes to securing crop diversity important for the world’s food production. The number of seed samples stored in the Seed Vault has now reached over one million, representing an invaluable resource for global food and agriculture.

The seed vault stores several tens of thousands variants of important food plants such as beans, wheat and rice. In total there are more than 4000 different species in the seed vault. These seed samples are duplicates of seed samples that are stored in national, regional and international gene banks.