How to Build a Doomsday Seed Vault

A doomsday seed vault is used to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters. Recently one opened deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. This vault is designed to house seeds for all countries. Based on current prospection, the vault will not able to be filled within our lifetime, but just in case, this is what it takes to build one of your own.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

1. The first step is to locate a property for your vault and an investor for the project. (Unless you are incredibly wealthy.) One of the key components is location. To avoid damage to the vault from earthquakes, you will need a location where you can embed the vault several hundred feet beneath the earth. To save on energy costs, this location should remain frigid, below 0 degrees Fahrenheit; otherwise there will be expensive air conditioning bills.

2. 

   Once the location, engineering and proper permits are acquired from the local governing authority, begin to blast into the earth. You will need to tunnel several hundred feet either into the ground or into a mountain side to ensure stability of the vault. As part of the engineering process, a complete geological survey should be done to avoid areas too close to fault lines where plate shifting, as a result of geological activity, could cause damage to your structure. When the tunneling is complete, the next step is to blast chambers at the end of the tunnel for storing the seeds.

3. Once the blasting is complete, begin to build the walls. Walls should be constructed of concrete reinforced with steel reinforcement bar and/or wire mesh and should be in the area of one meter thick. Consult your contractor for thickness and reinforcement bar gauge requirements. These walls should be durable enough to withstand natural disasters such as earthquakes as well as nuclear attacks.

4. 

   Equip the inner chambers with deep-freeze Air Conditioning units designed to bring the temperature down below 0 degrees Fahrenheit. At these temperatures, many seeds should be preserved for up to 1000 years or more.

5. Once these steps have been completed, along with a few other minor steps (see your contractor for details), you are ready to start storing seeds for growers around the world as well as using your new seed bank for a number of other questionable activities which would benefit from ownership of a vault deep within a secluded arctic mountain range such as genetic and agricultural research for the purpose of controlling the world's agricultural reproduction.