Water leaked into the Svalbard Global Seed Vault after melting of permafrost in the area – the vault now needs to be upgraded in face of climate change!
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, sometimes known as the Doomsday Vault, is a seed storage facility aimed at conserving biological material even if humans were to perish from the earth. It is built in a remote part of the Norwegian island Svalbard where it is cold enough to keep the seeds frozen even if the electricity were to disappear, but for the first time water has leaked into the facility!
The facility is located at the end of a 130 meter long tunnel, deep inside a mountain, and houses more than 930,000 different seed samples. It has a capacity of 4.5 million seed samples, so it is far from full, and conservation biologists are working hard to supply to vault with new seeds to make the collection even bigger.
The entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Image is public domain.
The water that seeped into the entrance is due to melting of the permafrost outside of the facility, where global temperature increase lead to the melting. When the seed bank was built no one anticipated the temperature rise to be so fast, so apparently they had not planned for this scenario. Now the Norwegian government has plans to upgrade the system to prevent these leaks from happening again. The exact cost is not known, but it will most likely be very expensive to make the vault secure from more water leaks.
Luckily no seeds were damaged from the leaks, and it was not very dramatic, but it goes to show that even places built to last longer than the human kind suffers from the effects of global warming.
The seed bank is built for the purpose of storing unique seeds in any disaster events where the original species or variety is lost. Agricultural officials from Syria has already requested seeds, because some of the strains were lost during the war, and were supplied with these so that they were able to continue to grow the same plants that they have traditionally used. The vault is also supposed to work as a failsafe in the case of an apocalypse where most of the agricultural seeds are lost because of some disaster, but we should all hope it won’t come to that.
Inside the vault. Image by Dag Endresen, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
I would hate to be the only survivor of whatever worldwide disaster, living in Africa for example and I would have to walk all the way to this seed vault to get a crop of veggies going.
I doubt I would ever arrive there :)
What I dont get either is that scientists prolly know that climate changes through centuries in a natural way.
We had Iceages and warmer climates through time.
I wonder why this wasnt taken into consideration before building this vault.
Also whats the use of this vault to mankind if mankind would someday dissapear of the planet? Excuses for typos, English is not my first language :)
Haha, that would be an insane trip to get to it! The problem is that Svalbard is almost impossible to get to without a big ship or a plane as well, seeing as it's a remote island way north of mainland Norway.
Yeah, it is baffling to me as well. We all know the world is getting hotter, even without man-made changes, so this would have happened somewhere along the time anyway. I don't really get why they didn't plan better for this either :P
Well, it might not really have any uses if all of mankind disappears. I guess it's more used for a scenario where most of the humans disappear, but not all :)
Thanks for the comment, @openheart!
It's kind of crazy that they didn't really think it could get that bad, that fast. Even the people who are preparing don't have a handle on how badly we're hurting our planet — and how could they? It's exponential.
I hope these guys bounce back hard... it's a fascinating and vital project. :(
I think someone must have made some miscalculations at some point. It seems really strange that they did not plan for the temperature increase at this point.
I think the Norwegian government is extremely interested in keeping this project going, so most likely the facility will be upgraded pretty quickly.
It is always hard to make those things permanent when dozens of years are accounted for. This is however important!
another great post of yours.
I never knew about this vault before. It is managing a huge amount of seeds in it. The biologists are really doing a great job here. Thanks again for sharing this wonderful article.