Norway adds seeds to its doomsday vault
“In my experience, there’s been water intrusion at the front of the tunnel every single year,” he said. To get into the vault, seeds have to get past five doors with coded locks.Ĭary Fowler, an agriculturalist and one of the vault’s original creators, stressed to various magazines that the vault will probably be fine. Seeds arrive in boxes which are then scanned via X-ray to ensure only seeds are within. Though there are other seed banks, Svalbard is the backup in the event all the others fail. The vault’s seeds have only been withdrawn once, in 2015, to help another seed bank that had lost much of its supply.Īlmost every country in the world has donated seeds. Back then it only had about 187,000 seeds in store. Any country can give seeds to be stored for no cost. Crop Trust is funded by groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s run by Crop Trust, a nonprofit organization responsible with preserving the world’s crop diversity. The vault holds 900,000 seeds and it could hold up to 2.5 billion. The Svalbard Seed Vault is kept at -0.4 degrees Celsius. The Arctic Ocean island’s summers reach up to 4 degrees Celsius, (39.2 Fahrenheit) but the temperature up on the mountain never gets that high. Though the permafrost did melt around the tunnel entrance, it will not do so around the facility itself. Experts say the melting is season dependent and the new measures being taken should stop the problem before it gets out of hand. The facility wasn’t watertight because no one thought it would need to be, but now temperatures are warming. In fact, the entire Arctic has been getting historically hot in recent years, causing numerous glaciers that have been around for thousands of years to melt and raising water levels all around the world. This is not the only effect of global warming. Originally, scientists thought the vault would stay frozen for 200 years. The vault was meant to survive on its own without human intervention, but now scientists are closely watching it to avoid a repeat of this near disaster. Drainage ditches will also be dug on the mountain. One of these new measures put in place to assure the safety of these precious seeds includes the removal of a heat sources, like a transformer station. The group did, however, take back those claims the following Saturday, saying that the seeds should be fine with the new safety measures. No seeds were harmed this time, but Statsbygg, the Norwegian Directorate of Public Construction and Property, warned that in the future the world’s greatest collection of crops could be damaged. The increase in heat was caused by climate change. Officials were forced to chip away the invading ice. In a surprise to the vault’s designers, that permafrost melted, flooding parts of the entrance. The Norwegian island Spitsbergen was chosen for a number of reasons the site is accessible, it’s perch above water makes it safe, and scientists thought the Arctic permafrost would never melt. One has to travel 400 feet above sea level and 400 feet into a mountain to find this “doomsday vault.”
Located on an archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, the vault is built into a mountain with a long tunnel serving as an entrance. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was designed to hold the world’s seeds as a backup in the case of a worldwide catastrophe. An Arctic seed vault meant to survive global crises has been breached by water.