“Almost every country has its own national genebank,” Stefan Schmitz, executive director of the Crop Trust, tells Popular Science. Now, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault houses 1,378,238 seed samples from almost every country globally, with room for millions more. That week alone, 14 genebanks from around the world deposited more than 11,200 seed samples, underscoring the critical role of crop diversity in future food security. “We managed, from Svalbard, to retrieve the [samples of seeds] to our new genebanks in Morocco and in Lebanon,” he says. Now, Sudanese genebank workers are following in the footsteps of those in Syria, sending seeds to Svalbard amid their civil war.