Norway has built a "doomsday" seed vault deep within an Arctic mountain.

The vault will host and most importantly protect millions of food crops from eventual climate changes, wars and natural disasters. The vault that reminds of Noah’s ark was opened Tuesday in a mountain near the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

"With climate change and other forces threatening the diversity of life that sustains our planet, Norway is proud to be playing a central role in creating a facility capable of protecting what are not just seeds, but the fundamental building blocks of human civilization," Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said.

The Norwegian authorities had numerous guests at the opening ceremony. Among them, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai of Kenya congratulated the Norway top officials for what will be known from now on as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

The so-called "Doomsday Vault" is about 425 feet deep inside a frozen mountain and will probably be the ultimate safety net for the world's seed collections. The vault will serve as backup for hundreds of other seed banks worldwide.

The vault located near Longyearbyen, in the remote Svalbard islands between Norway and the North Pole, was built with money from the Norwegian government. Norway paid 50 million-krone ($9.3 million) for the underground complex.

The first seeds were placed by Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Wangari Maathai.

According to the, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault can hold up to 4.5 million samples, or 2 billion seeds, and started with 268,000 samples comprising 100 million seeds.

"This is the first time the international community has taken a dramatic initiative to preserve crop diversity in perpetuity. That's important because crop diversity is absolutely essential to the survival of agriculture,'' said Cary Fowler, executive secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, for Bloomberg.