The government of prefix = st1 /Norwayis planning to build an unusual storage center on an island in the Arctic Ocean. The place would be large enough to hold about two million seeds. The goal is to present all crops known to scientists. The British magazine New Scientist published details of the plan last month. The structure will be designed to protect the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate change and other possible threats. It will be built in a mountain on the NorwegianislandofSpitsbergen. The mountain is less than one thousand kilometers from the North Pole, the northernmost position on earth. An international group called the Global Crop Diversity Trust is working on the project. The director of the group, Cary Fowler, spoke to New Scientist. He said the project would let the world rebuild agriculture if, in his word, "the worst came to the worst". Norwayis expected to start work next year. The project is expected to cost three million dollars. Workers will drill deep in the side of a sandstone mountain. Temperatures in the area never rise above 0oC. The seeds will be protected behind concrete walls a meter thick and high-security door. The magazine report says the collection will represent the products of ten thousand years of farming. Most of the seeds at first will come from collections at seed banks in Africa, Asia and Latin America. To last a long time, seeds need to be kept in very low temperatures. Workers will not be present all the time. But they plan to replace the air inside the storage space each winter. Winter temperatures on the island are about eighteen degrees below 0oC. The cold weather would protect the seeds even if the air could not be replaced. Mr. Fowler says the proposed structure will be the world's most secure gene bank. He says the plant seeds would only be used when all other seeds are gone for some reason. Norwayfirst proposed the idea in the 1980s. But security concerns delayed the plan. At that time, the Soviet Union was meeting inRomeof the Food and Agriculture Organization. The project is meant to   _  .
increase the world's food output in the future carry out some scientific experiments on plant genes protect crop seeds from dying out in case of possible disasters build an exhibition centre of the world's plant seeds