XPost: no.alt.diskusjoner, sac.politics, alt.global-warming
XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
The seed bank designed to preserve the world’s crops and plants
in the event of global disaster isn’t prepared to withstand the
greatest global disaster facing our planet: global warming.
Melting permafrost on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, where
the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is located, has seeped into the
seed bank, raising questions of how the structure will be able
to survive in the future as the Earth keeps warming.
The seed vault is built in an abandoned Arctic coal mine, deep
inside a mountain. It contains about a million packets of seeds
from almost every country in the world, representing “the most
diverse collection of food crop seeds.” In 2015, the ongoing
civil war in Syria prompted researchers in the Middle East to
withdraw some seeds to replace those previously stored in a gene
bank in war-torn Aleppo.
The structure was built underneath the permafrost so it could be
“a fail-safe seed storage facility, built to stand the test of
time — and the challenge of natural or man-made disasters,” as
the seed bank’s website says. But oh, the irony. Unusually warm
temperatures in the winter have caused rain, and the permafrost
has been melting. “It was not in our plans to think that the
permafrost would not be there and that it would experience
extreme weather like that,” Hege Njaa Aschim, from the Norwegian
government, which owns the vault, told The Guardian.
Fortunately, the water hasn’t flooded the vault itself. It only
got to the entrance of the tunnel, where it froze. (The seeds
are stored at minus 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit.) But the incident
has raised questions over the durability of a seed bank that was
supposed to operate without people’s intervention.
The vault managers are now waterproofing the facility and
digging trenches to channel melt and rainwater away, according
to The Guardian. They’ve also installed pumps in case the vault
floods again. “We have to find solutions. It is a big
responsibility and we take it very seriously. We are doing this
for the world,” Åsmund Asdal at the Nordic Genetic Resource
Centre, which operates the seed vault, told The Guardian. “This
is supposed to last for eternity.”
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/19/15664298/svalbard-global-seed- vault-norway-doomsday-climate-change
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