Randa Abdel-Fattah

The clock was ticking, right?

And in 1916, Longyear sold his company's assets to a Norwegian coal mining company.

On June 28, 1919, in France's Hall of Mirrors, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, formally ending World War I. The treaty accelerated a shift that was already underway, moving the world from the age of empires to the age of nation-states.

And it established the League of Nations, an international organization designed to maintain world peace through diplomacy.

The powers were meeting to kind of divvy up what was left of the world.

This included convening a conference on, quote, passport and customs formalities to create a uniform 32-page booklet, a passport, that would be required to travel across borders.

There wasn't really a place for a place with no ruler.

And so... Svalbard was formally kind of bestowed upon Norway by the international community.

Why?

Because Norway had been a good ally during the war.

And it had the biggest presence on Svalbard, including a company that until a few years earlier had been owned by John Monroe Longyear.

The treaty also carved out an exception for other corporate interests in Svalbard, keeping its borders open for business.

But over time, it did come to represent a place of global cooperation.

75 boxes of seeds were carried down a red carpet today on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean headed for cold storage.

Really cold storage.

Since 2008, Svalbard has even housed a large post-apocalyptic seed vault meant to safeguard the planet's food crops if the worst ever happens.

Some call it a doomsday vault.

Others, a Noah's Ark for global agriculture.

Recently, with the race for the Arctic heating up and as more countries, including the U.S., have challenged the sovereignty of nations around the world, Norway has begun pushing more firmly to assert its sovereignty over Svalbard and fend off foreign influence, cracking down on land sales to foreigners, stripping away foreigners' voting rights, limiting scientific research, and claiming hundreds of miles of Svalbard's seas.

Maybe they're seeing the writing on the wall, that the world order might be shifting again.