The Doomsday Vault sure has a menacing name. Located in the Norwegian Arctic, the huge building is officially named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and acts as a safe haven for the world’s breakthrough scientific documents and seeds. Every country can own a space in the vault, including North Korea, whose government has also sent specimen to be housed here. The project is intended to insure against a global crisis in which the world’s crops may fail. Only very few people are allowed into the vault, which is accessed only a handful of times a year. However, the first ever withdrawal was made recently — because of the Syrian War. As of 2015, the bank housed over 4,000 species with around 850,000 samples.
