Norway has just started a project to store millions of the world’s plant seeds in a huge frozen mountainside vault a mere 600 or so miles away from the North Pole. Kind of like Deep Impact? Yeah. Kind of like Noah’s Ark? Yeah. But also kind of cool – call it real-life data back-up.

Just as animals are going extinct on this planet, plants are dying out rapidly as well. A Popular Science article (no link up yet) on the topic notes that of 8,000 crops varieties that were surveyed in a U.S. study in 1903, only 600 remained 80 years later. We obviously need plants to live, so why not back them up somewhere safe?

How long until we start doing this with animal DNA (if we aren’t already)? Noah’s Ark doesn’t really need to be an ark, it can be room in the side of a mountain simply filled with viles of DNA samples. Now we’re starting to sound like Jurassic Park. Will you one day be able to steal a snow leopard in a false-bottomed Barbasol can?

The vault, located on the Svalbard Islands 300 miles north of mainland Norway (so I think it will be safe) should be opening for business in the fall.

I see this somehow being made into a really cheesy Sci-Fi movie…