
Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts - finid
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/19/arctic-stronghold-of-worlds-seeds-flooded-after-permafrost-melts
======
nonbel
>"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."

This story makes the design/management of that place look really bad. In 2007
the IPCC was predicting a 0.4 C average temperature rise by 2020 and about 1.0
C by 2040[1], etc. This isn't too far off from what happened[2], so this makes
it look like they did not plan ahead at all.

[1] [http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-
report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm...](http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-
report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf) (Figure SPM.5)

[2]
[http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/wti](http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/wti)

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
That and saving the seeds of flowering plants without preserving eggs of
pollinating insects isn't very useful.

~~~
pmoriarty
I remember hearing I think it was a Radiolab episode which talked of an
instance where a lot pollination was done by humans, by hand, with paint
brushes and pollen. It turned out that the humans were actually better at it
than the insects, because they were more consistent. So the result was a crop
that was larger than it would have been had insects done the pollinating.

It's kind of a "waste" of human effort to do manual pollination like that
rather than having insects do it "for free", but in an emergency, if that's
all you've got, then it can be done.

It also seems to me like this kind of work would be ripe for automation with
robots or drones somewhere down the line if, say, most bees wound up dying out
and humans were forced to pollinate by hand at a large scale.

~~~
celias
podcast - [http://www.radiolab.org/story/what-dollar-value-
nature/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/what-dollar-value-nature/)

blog - [http://www.radiolab.org/story/how-important-
bee__kw/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/how-important-bee__kw/)

------
overcast
"It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and
that it would experience extreme weather like that,”

Sorry, but isn't that the entire point of a "doomsday vault". To protect from
doomsday events, like extreme climate change?

~~~
ajmurmann
It not really a doomsday vault despite the media trying to portrait it like
that. It's really a seed storage for anyone who wants to store some seeds.

I visited the vault a few years ago and was very disappointed to learn this. I
had imagined some committee planning what we need to get back from Mad Max to
normal. But it's really more like a bank lock box.

~~~
jansho
But..

 _“We have to find solutions. It is a big responsibility and we take it very
seriously. We are doing this for the world.”

“This is supposed to last for eternity,” said Åsmund Asdal at the Nordic
Genetic Resource Centre, which operates the seed vault._

~~~
ajmurmann
Yes, it is supposed to last "forever". It's not however a "doomsday vault"
that is supposed to protect from "doomsday events". It's not meant to carry us
through the apocalypse or literally last forever.

------
nswanberg
"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."

------
pmoriarty
It would be interesting to learn what mistakes were made on a process level
here.

Were warnings from people who predicted flooding ignored for some reason, like
warning of concerned NASA engineers about the safety of the Space Shuttle? Or
did no one honestly predict flooding in a region covered by snow despite
global warming?

There could be some valuable lessons here for participants in Long Now and
similar projects.

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anigbrowl
_The vault’s managers are now waiting to see if the extreme heat of this
winter was a one-off or will be repeated or even exceeded as climate change
heats the planet._

I really want to believe that this is an example of poor communication by the
journalist as opposed to clueless passivity by administrators. Unfortunately,
I suspect it's accurate.

~~~
halomru
Later on the article describes that they installed pumps and removed heat
sources. Of course that doesn't solve the problem of operating without humans
and without flooding, but I imagine getting funding for major changes is much
easier once it's exceedingly clear that this wasn't a fluke.

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klipt
> "failsale" against "man-made disasters"

Nothing is fool proof to a sufficiently talented fool!

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vivekd
>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”.

Guess it wasn't all that fail safe after all

------
amingilani
If you'd like to see more about how the Svalbard Seed Vault works and how
countries including North Korea have seeds stored there, Veritasium has a
great video on the subject:
[https://youtu.be/2_OEsf-1qgY](https://youtu.be/2_OEsf-1qgY)

------
njarboe
It looks like an engineering flaw that lets outside water into 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,” The fact that the water froze as it
entered is good as that means the vault was still very cold. Likely this has
an engineering fix. It would be nice if the article discussed if the vault
temp was rising faster than expected and if/when passive cooling would fail in
the future. This should be the real worry about vault failure. Sophisticated
click bait, really.

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otempomores
Ice coated satellite on a reL long ellipse.. Seed drop on no signal in
capsules in exp time intervals

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rbanffy
Antarctica then?

~~~
anigbrowl
What's the point of putting it somewhere maximally inaccessible with lots of
ice? I was never that sold on the idea of putting it on a coastal island to
begin with. I realize they want somewhere cold but a large mountain cave seems
a better bet. That's where we put things that are meant to withstand nuclear
war or similarly drastic upheavals.

I don't blame the organizers for that, it's a lot harder to raise money for
protecting biodiversity than for making weapon systems, but this outcome
suggests to me that our institutional cooperation models of governance are not
working well.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Placing the vault in a more populous and accessible region increases the
possibility of, well, take your pick: theft, terrorism, political
interference, collateral damage in the case of war, and so on.

~~~
anigbrowl
The existence of other considerations doesn't validate the poor choices that
have already been made. I said at the time that putting a vault on a small
island near sea level might not be a great plan given the wholly predictable
rise in sea levels over the long term.

It was a predictably stupid decision, and the only surprising part is that the
stupidity became obvious so early rather than 50 or 75 years from now as more
conservative models of climate change suggested could be the case.

I am _absolutely_ in favor of projects like this that are built to maximize
survivability of ecosystems in the face of unpredictable change. But you are
saying that all risks are equivalent over the long term and it's impossible to
choose between them, which I think is an absurd copout.

The reality here is that there wasn't enough money or political will to invest
in something more obviously permanent, so we ended up with a shitty system
that has started to fail within a single decade, will now probably have to be
decommissioned (because the problem is only likely to get worse), and we've
got to start over. It's not a total write-off, much valuable work has been
done, but it's plain that trying to cheap out on the location was a dreadful
false economy.

~~~
Pinckney
The vault is 130m above sea level. It's not going to flood even if the arctic
and antarctic both melt entirely.

