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It is situated in a safe place,” says Bente Naeverdal, a property manager who oversees the day-to-day operation of the vault. “It is away from the places on earth where you have war and terror, everything maybe you are afraid of in other places. It was precisely for its remoteness that Svalbard was chosen as the location of the vault. Near the entrance to the facility, a rectangular wedge of concrete that juts out starkly against the snowy landscape, the doomsday nickname seems eerily apt. This past winter offered the gene bank a chance to redress the balance. Genetic material is being lost all over the globe,” says Marie Haga, executive director of the Crop Trust. “There are big and small doomsdays going on around the world every day. On this occasion, samples from India, Pakistan and Mexico were being deposited alongside seeds from Syria, many of whose citizens are living through their own apocalypse. But it is the much smaller, localized destruction and threats facing gene banks all over the world that the vault was designed to protect against-and it’s why the vault was opened in February, when TIME visited. The Global Seed Vault has been dubbed the “doomsday” vault, which conjures up an image of a reserve of seeds for use in case of an apocalyptic event or a global catastrophe. It is the farthest north you can fly on a commercial airline, and apart from the nearby town of Longyearbyen, it is a vast white expanse of frozen emptiness. It would be difficult to find a place more remote than the icy wilderness of Svalbard.