“This whole planet is warming, and that includes Svalbard.” “At the end of the day we have to realize that in a sense, everything is relative with this initiative,” Fowler told the magazine. However, that doesn’t mean that the underlying cause for the melting permafrost – warming temperatures – should be ignored. “What happens is, in the summer the permafrost melts, and some water comes in, and when it comes in, it freezes. “The tunnel was never meant to be watertight at the front, because we didn’t think we would need that,” Fowler 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. “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 the magazine. However, 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. Representatives for Statsbygg and Crop Trust did not immediately respond to an emailed interview request Saturday. So which is it? Is the fact that some water seeped into a “fail-safe” vault no big deal? Or are we as a human race doomed to die, starving and cropless, in the event of global catastrophe? “The seeds are safe and sound,” tweeted the Crop Trust, an international nonprofit group that helped establish the Svalbard vault in 2008. Finally, to be “better safe than sorry,” Statsbygg says researchers will closely follow the development of permafrost on Svalbard. In addition, waterproof walls would be erected inside the tunnel. But a spokeswoman for Statsbygg - a group that advises the Norwegian government, which owns the vault - cautioned that it might only be a matter of time before they were.Īccording 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. Though water did get past the vault’s threshold, none of the seeds had been damaged. “Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts,” the newspaper announced. 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 melt, “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. Water had apparently breached this “fail-safe” trove of the planet’s seeds that is supposed to protect earth’s food supply in the event of a “doomsday” scenario. On Friday, a slew of alarming headlines emerged regarding the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
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