“The doomsday vault.”
The best-known nickname for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a secure facility built into a mountainside near Longyearbyen and opened in 2008 to store backup duplicates of seed samples from gene banks worldwide as insurance against the loss of crop diversity from war, disaster, or mismanagement.
— Traditional Svalbard & Jan Mayen Customs, Svalbard & Jan Mayen
Source: Widely used nickname in international media coverage of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault; the facility is operated in partnership with the Norwegian government, the Crop Trust, and NordGen.
More Proverbs from Svalbard & Jan Mayen
It applies to all of Svalbard.
The warning posted on signs at the edge of every Svalbard settlement, reminding residents and visitors that beyond the town limits the polar bear danger — and the requirement to carry a means of protection — applies everywhere, with no safe zone.
Do not leave the settlement without a rifle.
Because polar bears roam year-round even near towns, official guidance and everyday practice both hold that anyone travelling beyond a settlement boundary must carry suitable means of scaring off or defending against a bear, most commonly a rifle.
Take your shoes off before you go inside.
A custom carried over from the coal-mining era, when miners removed coal-dust-covered boots before entering homes, shops, and offices. The habit has outlasted the mines themselves and is still widely observed in Longyearbyen today.
Leave your door unlocked, in case someone needs to run inside.
With almost no crime and a real chance that a polar bear encounter could force anyone to seek the nearest shelter, residents of Longyearbyen traditionally leave houses and cars unlocked, both as a practical safety measure and as a sign of community trust.
Nobody is born in Longyearbyen, and nobody dies here.
Because permafrost prevents bodies from decomposing safely and the local hospital cannot handle complex births, expectant mothers traditionally travel to mainland Norway to give birth and the dying are flown out for burial. The line has become the best-known saying about the town, even though it exaggerates what is really a practical health and burial policy rather than a literal law.
There are no cats in Svalbard.
After miners' pet cats began preying on nesting seabirds, Norway banned bringing cats onto the archipelago in 1925 to protect its bird colonies. The rule still stands today and is one of the territory's most often-repeated facts.