Experts have allayed fears of any threat to the Global Seed Vault, in Svalbard, Norway, after swelling water breached the “fail-safe” store of the planet’s seeds that is supposed to protect earth’s food supply in the event of a “doomsday” scenario.
The alleged failure of the vault, buried deep into an Arctic mountainside, had occurred after warmer than usual temperatures had caused a layer of permafrost to thaw, “sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel” and presumably putting the world’s most diverse collection of crop seeds at risk, according to the Guardian.
“Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts,” the newspaper wrote in its headline.
Svalbard is also home to the World Arctic Archive, where the world’s most precious books will be stored in digital form, allowing them to survive the most extreme conditions, including nuclear war.
Incredible new technology, by a firm called Piql, will be used to store data as film, rather than hard drives, or other forms of storage.
The film will be stored deep inside a deep mine called Mine 3 that is frozen in permafrost, ensuring it keeps a constant temperature.
Though water did get past the seed vault’s threshold in the latest incident, none of the seeds had been damaged.
“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,” Hege Njaa Aschim, a spokeswoman for Statsbygg — a group that advises the Norwegian government, which owns the vault —told the Guardian of the water breach.
She added that officials were now observing the seed vault around the clock to “minimise all the risks and make sure the seed bank can take care of itself”.
Also, in a statement on the seed vault’s website, on Saturday, Statsbygg described the incident as a “season-dependent intrusion of water” into the outer part of the seed vault, but added that it was now taking precautionary measures to make improvements to the outer tunnel to prevent future occurrences.
“The seeds in the seed vault have never been threatened and will remain safe during implementation of the measures,” the statement read.
According to the statement, the proposed improvements include removing heat sources, such as a transformer station, from the tunnel, as well as constructing drainage ditches on the mountainside to prevent meltwater from accumulating around the entrance. In addition, waterproof walls would be erected inside the tunnel.
Finally, to be “better safe than sorry,” Statsbygg says researchers will closely follow the development of permafrost on Svalbard.
“The seeds are safe and sound,” tweeted the Crop Trust, an international nonprofit group that helped establish the Svalbard vault in 2008.
Also, Crop Trust, on Saturday, twice retweeted a Popular Science article that seemed to indicate the situation was not as dire as had been initially reported.
“In my experience, there’s been water intrusion at the front of the tunnel every single year,” Cary Fowler, an American agriculturist, who helped create the seed vault, told Popular Science.
Though he was not at the vault to observe the incident, he noted that “flooding” was probably not the most accurate word to describe what happened.
“The tunnel was never meant to be watertight at the front, because we didn’t think we would need that,” Fowler further told the magazine, adding: “What happens is, in the summer the permafrost melts, and some water comes in, and when it comes in, it freezes. It doesn’t typically go very far.”
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