Buried in the side of a mountain in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, the Global Seed Vault stores virtually every kind of seed.

And on Wednesday, that seed vault got even more seeds — almost 50,000 new samples — to help preserve biodiversity. Those returning samples include the ones sent out in 2015 to replace a collection that had been damaged by the Syrian civil war.

Cary Fowler, the man considered the “father” of the seed vault and a former executive director of the international nonprofit organisation Crop Trust, compares it to a safety deposit box: the point of the vault is not for apocalyptic scenarios, but serves more as a sort of back-up drive.

Fowler told Business Insider in October that the vault is used to store duplicates of existing seed banks that have been collecting seeds for 100 years. That way, if a regional seed vault loses something, the Svalbard collection can replace the sample.

Take a look inside the vault:

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