
A Vault containing seeds for virtually every edible plant - golanggeek
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-vault/
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0xfaded
The permafrost where the vault is dug significantly melted last year.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/19/arctic-s...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/19/arctic-
stronghold-of-worlds-seeds-flooded-after-permafrost-melts)

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icelancer
I get that climate change is a problem but this article reads like they blame
it and man-made effects 100%. Shouldn't the vault be very well constructed
against things like this, especially since it's supposed to stand for decades
without human intervention?

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yoz-y
The headlines at that time were largely sensational. Some precisions were made
later: the seeds were never in danger, only the beginning of the tunnel was
flooded. The tunnel is long and it is there precisely for this reason.

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amingilani
Veritasium did a video on this called Inside the Svalbard Seed Vault[1].
Totally recommend it!

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_OEsf-1qgY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_OEsf-1qgY)

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riffraff
The title is wrong, afaict. There's a ton of plants which are edible but not
"crops", i.e. not farmed, but the vault is focused on agricultural seeds.

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hartator
I kind of wonder the utility of something like this, if crops get wipe out for
whatever reasons, I am sure finding new viable seeds will never be a real
issue compared to fighting whatever wipe out the crops in the first place.

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pm90
That is a really simplistic way to think about this. Most of the crops that we
grow today were perfected after millenia of selective breeding and cannot be
found in the wild. So the only place you can find them are in human granaries
and fields grown and maintained by humans. Without humans to harvest and
cultivate these crops (fertilizers, tilling, irrigation) most of the crops
would likely perish.

Although it sounds horrible, I can certainly imagine a scenario in which some
kind of catastrophe would wipe out a large section of the human race, and
perhaps most of our farmers/crop growers as well. A decade after this
catastrophe if a post-apocalyptic human race gains some kind of political
stability, it would be immensely useful to have this kind of vault to restart
agriculture.

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weaksauce
How long do the seeds stay viable? Are they stored differently to make them
viable for longer than normal?

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chrisseaton
> Are they stored differently

Differently... from what?

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arsmoriendi
I think they meant if they have to be stored under special conditions like an
dry, cool and low-oxygen environment.

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dogma1138
Cool and dry sorta they have had some issues due to climate change overall
it’s hust seeds in boxes kept at low temperatures they don’t need special
storage other than a nominally sterile environment to prevent rot and other
environmental issues such as mold, fungi and other pests feeding on them.

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shmerl
Vavilov died in prison accused by stalinist regime because of his firm
rejection of fake ideas of Lysenko.

