Svalbard Global Seed Vault — Attraction in Spitsbergen

You don’t stumble on the Doomsday Vault. You go looking for it, past the polar bears and the coal dust, up where Svalbard starts to feel like another planet. It sits halfway buried in the mountain, a steel door glowing faint blue like it’s guarding the future or maybe what’s left of it.

They built it in 2008, the Norwegians did, with help from the rest of the world. Every country shipped in seeds, rice, wheat, barley, even corn from Kansas, little paper envelopes of hope sealed and frozen at minus eighteen Celsius. The idea was simple. When humanity screws up, we’ll have something left to plant. Insurance against ourselves.

It isn’t open to the public, which makes it even better. You stand there in the cold, wind howling, wondering if inside that mountain is the last tomato on Earth. They say it could survive nukes, floods, even the end of civilization. Then in 2017 it flooded a little from melting permafrost. Turns out even the apocalypse vault isn’t safe from climate change.

Still, there’s something holy about it. A bunker for life itself. A place built by the same species that needs warning labels on shampoo.

You leave thinking maybe, just maybe, we’re not...

A pipe bomb is an improvised explosive device (IED) that uses a tightly sealed section of pipe filled with an explosive material. The containment provided by the pipe means that simple low explosives can be used to produce a relatively large explosion due to the containment causing increased pressure. The fragmentation of the pipe itself creates potentially lethal shrapnel.

Premature detonation is a hazard of attempting to construct any homemade bomb. The materials and methods used with pipe bombs often result in unintentional detonation, usually resulting in serious injury or death to the assembler.

In many countries, the manufacture or possession of a pipe bomb is a serious crime, regardless of its...

Svalbard Global seed vault. When in Svalbard you can visit this place just to get the feel of being in a place which would save the world from disaster. Public access to view inside is not available. In case of a massive destruction anywhere in the world, this place it seems has a backup of crop seeds from all over the world. Each country has stored the seeds here. The entrance which is not really massive does not actually give the correct size of the storage, which is nearly 130 meters into the mountain. From this location don’t forget to get a great view of the Longyearbyen airport. We also got a lucky shot of a Reindeer...