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1．LONGYEARBYEN, Norway — With plant species disappearing at an alarming rate, scientists and governments are creating a global network of plant banks to store seeds and sprouts, precious genetic resources that may be needed for man to adapt the world’s food supply to climate change.
挪威朗伊尔城——随着植物物种正在以骇人听闻的速度灭绝，科学家和各国政府正在创建全球网络性的植物库来储存种子和苗芽。人类可以利用这些珍贵的种芽资源确保充足的食物供应，以应对气候变化。
2．This week, the flagship of that effort, the Global Seed Vault near here, received its first seeds, millions of them. Bored into the middle of a frozen Arctic mountain topped with snow, the vault’s goal is to store and protect samples of every type of seed from every seed collection in the world.
本周，作为这种不懈努力的旗舰机构，“全球种子地库”接收了首批数百万种的种子。该地库建于北极的一座白雪皑皑的大山之中，其目标是储存和保护世界各地收藏的各类种子样本。
3．As of Thursday, thousands of neatly stacked and labeled gray boxes of seeds — peas from Nigeria, corn from Mexico — reside in this glazed cavelike structure, forming a sort of backup hard drive, in case natural disasters or human errors erase the seeds from the outside world.
截至周四，成千上万个堆放整齐且贴有标签的灰色种盒在上釉的洞穴式结构中安家落户，如尼日利亚的豌豆、墨西哥的玉米。这些盒子就如已经备份了的电脑硬盘，以防世界上的植物物种会因自然灾害和人为破坏而消失。
4．Descending almost 500 feet under the permafrost, the entrance tunnel to the seed vault is designed to withstand bomb blasts and earthquakes. An automated digital monitoring system controls temperature and provides security akin to a missile silo or Fort Knox. No one person has all the codes for entrance.
通往种子地库的入口隧道，位于永冻带下约500英尺处，其设计旨在防御爆炸和地震。自动化数字监控系统用于控制温度并提供类似导弹发射井或福特诺克斯军事基地的安全保障。任何人都不单独拥有进入种子库的全部密码。
5．The Global Vault is part of a broader effort to gather and systematize information about plants and their genes, which climate change experts say may indeed prove more valuable than gold. In Leuven, Belgium, scientists are scouring the world for banana samples and preserving their shoots in liquid nitrogen before they become extinct. A similar effort is under way in France on coffee plants. A number of plants, most from the tropics, do not produce seeds that can be stored.
目前，世界上很多人士致力于收集种子及其种子基因的信息并使之系统化，全球种子地库是这种全球性努力的的一个缩影。气候变化专家称，这些信息要比金子还要贵重。在比利时的鲁汶，科学家正在搜集世界上的香蕉样本并将香蕉芽保存在液体氮中，以防其灭绝。法国也正在进行类似的努力，保护咖啡物种。很多植物，大多数是来自热带地区的植物，无法通过种子繁殖，不能产生可供储存的种子。
6．For years, a hodgepodge network of seed banks has been amassing seed and shoot collections in a haphazard manner. Labs in Mexico banked corn species. Those in Nigeria banked cassava. Now these scattershot efforts are being urgently consolidated and systematized, in part because of better technology to preserve plant genes and in part because of the rising alarm about climate change and its impact on world food production.
多年来，很多庞杂的种子库网络一直以随意的方式收集种子和苗芽。例如，墨西哥的实验室收藏玉米种，尼日利亚的实验室收藏木薯种。现在，正对这些分散的努力进行亟需的整合和系统化操作。之所以可以这样做，部分原因是储存植物基因技术的更新，部分原因是气候变化的警钟继续长鸣及其对世界粮食产量的影响。
