“Currencies rise and fall with civilisations.”

Inside The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a “doomsday” storage facility is located on a remote Norwegian island in the Arctic Svalbard archipelago designed to safeguard the world’s crop diversity: "Extinction exists in all crops. Estimates are that every day one crop strain disappears. And here’s why: seeds used to be passed down through families. But today, farmers are planting mass-produced industrial seeds. The upside is more food. The downside is the family variety goes extinct.“ Cary Fowler. (American agriculturalist and Senior Advisor to the Global Crop Diversity Trust). This is probably the most important bank in the world, and the worlds insurance for the future. Around 1.5 million distinct seed samples of agricultural crops are thought to exist but the facility has a capacity to conserve 4.5 million. 5% percent of the seeds in the vault, about 18,000 samples with 500 seeds each, come from the Centre for Genetic Resources of the Netherlands (CGN), part of Wageningen University, Netherlands. Go here for the vault’s portal and Scott Pelley’s 60 Minutes CBS report here. The age of the Earth is 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years (4.54 × 109 years ± 1%) which means 4.54 billion (usgs) years old. We live on the 3rd planet from the Sun, densest, fifth-largest of the 8 planets in the Solar System and the largest of the Solar System’s 4 terrestrial planets. Our oceans were formed by rainfall that lasted literally millions of years or that 700 million years ago, earth was completely covered by ice that was a mile thick with surface temperatures reaching minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Interested? I was….recommend ordering the Blu-ray 5-episode untold story of how our planet’s geological forces have shaped human civilisation in the groundbreaking Emmy and BAFTA Nominated (Cinematography) documentary BBC series "How Earth Made Us” (CLIP). Presented by the "rock star" of geology Professor Iain Stewart (Amazon) – Online – Ep 1. Deep Earth, Ep. 2 Water, Ep. 3 Wind, Ep. 4 Fire, Ep. 5 Human planet.