A "doomsday" seed vault built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters opened Tuesday deep within an Arctic mountain on the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. 
"The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is our insurance policy," Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates at the opening ceremony. "It is the Noah's Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations."
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai of Kenya were among the dozens of guests who had bundled up for the ceremony inside the vault, about 130 meters (425 feet) deep inside a frozen mountain.
"This is a frozen Garden of Eden," Barroso said.
The vault will serve as a backup for hundreds of other seed banks worldwide. It has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the world and shield them from man-made and natural disasters. Dug into the permafrost of the mountain, it has been built to withstand an earthquake or a nuclear strike.
Norway owns the vault in Svalbard, which cost about NOK 50 million (USD 9 million) to build. Other countries can deposit seeds without charge and reserve the right to withdraw them upon need.
The operation is funded by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which was founded by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and Biodiversity International, a Rome-based research group.
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