Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts
It was designed as an
impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any
global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global
Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been
breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the
winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel.
The vault is on the
Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and contains almost a million packets of seeds,
each a variety of an important food crop. When it was opened in 2008, the deep
permafrost through which the vault was sunk was expected to provide “failsafe”
protection against “the challenge of natural or man-made disasters”. But soaring
temperatures in the Arctic at the end of the world’s
hottest ever recorded year led to melting and heavy rain, when light
snow should have been falling. “It was not in our plans to think that the
permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like
that,” said Hege Njaa Aschim, from the Norwegian government, which owns the
vault...
“A lot of water went
into the start of the tunnel and then it froze to ice, so it was like a glacier
when you went in,” she told the Guardian. Fortunately, the meltwater did not
reach the vault itself, the ice has been hacked out, and the precious seeds
remain safe for now at the required storage temperature of -18C. But the breach has
questioned the ability of the vault to survive as a lifeline for humanity if
catastrophe strikes. “It was supposed to [operate] without the help of humans,
but now we are watching the seed vault 24 hours a day,” Aschim said. “We must
see what we can do to minimise all the risks and make sure the seed bank can
take care of itself.” read more:
