At the time, about 97% of all internet searches were done through this popular web portal. In the early 90s, Mosaic was by far the most dominant web browser. This animated graphic by James Eagle chronicles the evolution of the web browser market, showing the rise and fall of various internet portals from January 1994 to March 2022. Comparatively, modern browsers in high use today have changed exponentially. Mosaic was one of the first “user-friendly” internet portals-although by today’s standards, the browser was actually quite difficult to access. But that all changed when the Mosaic web browser entered the scene in 1993. In its early stages, the internet was a highly technical interface that most people had difficulty navigating.
The wheat, barley, and grass seeds from the Aleppo bank are thought to have important traits resistant to drought, which researchers think could be increasingly important in the face of climate change.Īnimation: The Rise and Fall of Popular Web Browsers Since 1994 In 2015, war-torn Syria was the first country to withdraw seeds from the vault in order to replace those lost in Aleppo due to the ongoing civil conflict. Already Handy Onceĭespite remaining a pragmatic backup plan for the worst case global scenarios, the Doomsday Vault has already come in handy just a few years into its existence. This minimizes metabolic activity, which means that the seed vault will likely be able to preserve seeds for most major crops for thousands of years. Today’s infographic, from Futurism, has more on this Doomsday Vault that could one day help to save civilization:Ĭarved 390 ft (120 m) into a sandstone mountain in a Norwegian archipelago, the vault keeps the temperature of seeds well below freezing while also limiting humidity. Officially called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, it already holds close to a million samples of crops around the world, with each sample holding about 500 seeds. On a remote island that is just 800 miles (1,300 km) from the North Pole, the Norwegian government has built a failsafe in the freezing cold that protects thousands of the most vital crops from extinction. Well, besides the fact that the world’s cities have been replaced by smoking craters, there is some good news for the humans that survive a potentially apocalyptic scenario. Will everything be lost? Enter the ‘Doomsday Vault’ Maybe Donald Trump gets in an epic Twitter feud with Kim Jong-Un that initiates World War 3.Įither way, things are going sideways, and the fate of human civilization itself is at stake. The world used to cultivate around 7,000 different plants but experts say we now get about 60 per cent of our calories from three main crops - maize, wheat and rice - making food supplies vulnerable if climate change causes harvests to fail.Imagine that the unthinkable has happened.Ī massive asteroid impact triggers a “nuclear winter” effect, or one of the world’s most dangerous supervolcanos erupts. The vault also serves as a backup for plant breeders to develop new varieties of crops.
The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in Britain will bank seeds harvested from the meadows of Prince Charles' private residence, Highgrove, including from grass species, clovers and broad-leaved flowering herbs. Stefan Schmitz, Crop Trust executive director The seed vault is the backup in the global system of conservation to secure food security on Earth. On Tuesday 30 gene banks will deposit seeds, including from India, Mali, Peru and the Cherokee Nation in the United States, which will bank samples of maize, bean and squash. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built on an Arctic mountainside in 2008, was designed as a storage facility to protect vital crop seeds against the worst cataclysms of nuclear war or disease and safeguard global food supplies.ĭubbed the "doomsday vault," the facility lies on the island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, halfway between Norway and the North Pole, and is only opened a few times a year in order to preserve the seeds inside. A vault in the Arctic built to preserve seeds for rice, wheat and other food staples will contain one million varieties with the addition on Tuesday of specimens grown by Cherokee Indians and the estate of Britain's Prince Charles.