![]() The question is whether the operators can engineer a solution to keep the seed vault self-regulating. Pumps around the main vault are poised to whisk away any meltwater that might penetrate, according to Crop Trust. They're kept at minus 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 18 degrees Celsius) inside foil packages nestled in sealed boxes. The seeds themselves are kept 394 feet (120 meters) deep inside the mountain, frozen not just by permafrost, but by artificial cooling. Over time, they may even construct a new entrance in a less vulnerable spot. They also plan to construct waterproof walls inside the tunnel. They're constructing drainage ditches to move any meltwater away from the access tunnel entrance, rather than toward it. Officials are removing electrical equipment from the access tunnel to eliminate a potential source of heat, they said in a statement. The region is responding to global warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, heating up at twice the rate of the rest of the world, according to 2014 research.įor now, the Norwegian government (which owns the vault) is acting as if the high winter temperatures in the Arctic will be the new normal. Extremely high temperatures in the Arctic are melting permafrost (and inhibiting sea-ice growth). Permafrost failureīut climate change is causing this fail-safe facility to fail. The organization Crop Trust, which partially funds and supports the vault, calls this permafrost a "fail-safe" storage facility on its web page. The mountain's rock and year-round permafrost are intended to keep the seeds chilled even if humanity can no longer maintain power to the facility. The remote location is meant to be a feature of the vault. The seed vault is built inside a mountain on an archipelago in Norway and acts as a global backup storage system for crop diversity: Seeds from around the world are stored there. There are thought to be just under 900,000 seeds stored so far. Riccardo Gangale/Flickr CC BY-ND 2.The Svalbard Global Seed Vault announced on May 21 that it will be constructing new drainage ditches, building waterproof walls and taking other steps to protect its valuable contents from flooding. The new upgrades will hopefully mean that the vault will continue to be able to offer such a globally important service in the future, should anything else disastrous happen. The seeds were successfully planted and grown, with a replacement shipment of the seeds sent back to Norway in 2017. The seeds that had been stored in the Svalbard vault were withdrawn and sent to two centers – one in Morocco and the other in Lebanon – in order to rebuild a collection. Containing 155,000 varieties of crop, it was a central agricultural archive for the Fertile Crescent, one of the main hubs where farming began 10,000 years ago.Īfter being meticulously categorized, the seeds are stored away. Riccardo Gangale/Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0 In 2015 researchers withdrew seeds from the vault for the first time ever, after the civil war in Syria destroyed the main seed bank in Aleppo. ![]() If this all sounds like it might be a little over the top, well the vault has already successfully been put to use. This will include emergency power and refrigeration units, as well as a new access tunnel. New deposits are taken into the seed bank. Matthias Heyde/Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0īut the Norwegian government wants to take all the precautions they can, and have announced on the vaults 10th anniversary that they will spend $12.6 million as part of a long-term plan to improve and extend the performance of the facility. Water made it 15 meters (nearly 50 feet) down into the vault before it froze, meaning that no samples were damaged, but it did make many concerned for the future. This lead to the seed bank being flooded in 2016, after higher than average temperatures combined with a heavy rainfall. Unfortunately, when the vault was conceived, designed, and built, the engineers did not expect that climate change would begin thawing the permafrost at such a rapid rate. The vault was originally a coal mine. Matthias Heyde/Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0 This, they hope, will protect the world’s most significant crop varieties from any natural or manmade disaster that could strike. Built into an old coal mine on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen that plunges into the permafrost, the idea is that the permanently frozen soil keeps the samples below zero, thus preserving the seeds for up to a century.
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