HELSINKI (AP) — Nearly 10 years after a "doomsday" seed vault opened on an Arctic island, some 50,000 new samples from seed collections around the world have been deposited in the world's largest repository built to safeguard against wars or natural disasters wiping out global food crops.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the world's largest agricultural gene bank located on the Svalbard archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, was built as a master backup to the world's other seed banks.

A research center that focuses on improving agriculture in dry zones — the first to retrieve its seed collection from the vault in 2015 — on Wednesday returned some 15,000 specimens after multiplying and reconstituting them. The collections range from India to the Middle East, northern Africa and the Americas.