Arctic Stronghold of World's Seeds Flooded After Permafrost Melts (theguardian.com) 178
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: 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. The vault is on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and contains almost a million packets of seeds, each a variety of an important food crop. 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". But soaring temperatures in the Arctic at the end of the world's hottest ever recorded year led to melting and heavy rain, when light snow should have been falling. "It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that," said Hege Njaa Aschim, from the Norwegian government, which owns 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," she told the Guardian. 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. But the breach has questioned the ability of the vault to survive as a lifeline for humanity if catastrophe strikes.
Re:I guess they didn't run that simulation (Score:4, Insightful)
They didn't even need to run the simulations; higher temperatures than this have occurred pre-civilization, and that has been known for decades, so they should have been prepared for this.
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The earth has been an incandescent gas before. But this doesn't mean that we should expect the earth to be gaseous in the next ten thousand years.
Remember, all you AGW deniers were claiming all through 2001 to date how it was going to go back to an ice age (or at least the 1950's average) "any day now". So when they believed your BS, it's their fault you were wrong?
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It should be both. Government incompetence at accounting for global warming. Without one or the other there would be no problem.
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Well, I'm sure that if you're scientifically illiterate, that's what you'd believe.
Re: I guess they didn't run that simulation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: I guess they didn't run that simulation (Score:5, Insightful)
This story doesn't make sense. This is the month of May. Arctic thawing peaks in September. In May, the thaw is barely beginning. So either they made some astonishingly bad design decisions (unlikely), or TFA is exaggerating or fabricating what actually happened (much more likely).
In once sentence TFA says the leak is from "meltwater", and a few sentences later it blamed on heavy rain.
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Sounds to me that they just forgot to keep the snow sloped away from the entrance.
But that of course doesn't provide the clicks like climate change disasters does.
Re: I guess they didn't run that simulation (Score:3, Insightful)
What's glossed over in the story is how the 'melted permafrost' magically seeped into the vault facility (not the actual vault) and then, despite lower global temperatures caused by cow farts, Asian coal-powered generators, and cars, froze solid again.
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This is the month of May. Arctic thawing peaks in September. In May, the thaw is barely beginning....
That _is_ the point. In May, all the H20 should be solid, not liquid, at least based on previous year's records and the solid scientific assurances from Exxon-Mobil since the 1970s that global warming is a liberal lie.
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Maybe Algore needs to pay them a visit?
Re: I guess they didn't run that simulation (Score:2)
Why did the melted permafrost freeze over if the world keeps getting warmer? The permafrost melted, seeped into the rooms around the seed vault, then froze solid - how did that happen after 'incredible temperature increases'?
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It's bizarre how believers will close their eyes to basic facts in order to maintain some sort of perverse equilibrium with whatever cult belief they've latched onto.
Permafrost (Score:1)
It seems permafrost is no longer permanent, even in Svalbard up near the north pole.... 7 degrees celsius above normal.
Wow.
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even in Svalbard up near the north pole.... 7 degrees celsius above normal.
Of course, heat rises after all.
More importantly, did anyone check on the germ warfare vault next door?
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Duh! Have you ever even looked at a map? North is up!
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8 degree rise in the average global temperature = the last big die off, killing the majority of every species on the planet. The Permian–Triassic estinction event. So thankfully/hopefully this is local weather fluctuation rather than a example of coming events.
Also isn't that a false dychotomy.... we could tackle global warming AND go forwards at the same time. It seems all the electric cars and solar industries are creating the new jobs now anyway. So why would we go backwards to stuff like coal?
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Yes. The dinossaurs must have been running their SUVs too fast.
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Let's look honestly on this, we don't care so much about whether it's our fault so much as we care about the climate changing in a way *where we all will probably die*.
In that context, it would make sense to do things that are credible to counteract what we see. We see warming, our data tells us that lots of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere certainly don't *help* matters, so it would seem to behoove us to at least curb that (unless someone is suggesting that somehow our changes to the atmosphere have had
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how much climate change will kill us?
the earth has been significantly warmer than it is today. and significantly cooler.
shore lines change? and? does that mean people can't move?
do you think we'll have global famine? this is very quick for a geologic timescale, and even a generational timescale... but we live on neither of those. as it warms, certainly some arable farmland will become less suitable. but does that mean that new land will not open up? can we perhaps farm canada? it wouldn't be terribly hard
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It has been significantly warmer, when we weren't alive. It has been significantly cooler, again when we weren't alive.
The key is we know the score in terms of our current standard of living and current climate. Sure we can dream up better climate consequences in theory, in practice though we know how to play the game in front of us, and we can't be sure of how we can play in a new scenario, and we know that once changed, undoing it is going to be impossible or at least much much harder than avoiding the
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that problem sounds soluble.
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"Well, what if we go to all the trouble and expense to make a better world and it was all just a hoax?"
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dumbasses
Re: Permafrost (Score:2)
And then it froze again...
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Re:I guess they didn't run that simulation (Score:5, Interesting)
“We did this calculation; if all the ice in the world melted—Greenland, Arctic, Antarctic, everything—and then we had the world's largest recorded tsunami right in front of the seed vault. So, very high sea levels and the worlds largest Tsunami. What would happen to the seed vault?” Fowler says. “We found that the seed vault was somewhere between a five and seven story building above that point. It might not help the road leading up to the seed vault, but the seeds themselves would be ok."
http://www.popsci.com/seed-vau... [popsci.com]
Re: I guess they didn't run that simulation (Score:2)
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And that will not wind up warming up the vault when in operation?
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My clever plan would involve pumping out the water before it freezes.
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"The meltwater did not reach the vault.." (Score:5, Insightful)
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that is why we call msm fake news.
Re: "The meltwater did not reach the vault.." (Score:2)
Re: "The meltwater did not reach the vault.." (Score:5, Funny)
Right, and the author of the headline was completely unaware that this might cause confusion.
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Further, it's not the "world's seed bank", it's one of the smaller such facilities, of several worldwide. Funny how the ones in the US and England don't rely on permafrost.
Antarctica's... (Score:1)
...Dry Valleys. That's where it should have been built, if you're serious about 'long term'.
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yeah, those mj seeds sure make you forget to do things...
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hell i almost forgot to respond to this.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:There are three stories here.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Give him a chance, he just learned the word masturbate, hence the confusion.
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4. Your inability to spell "click-bait".
Maybe he was implying that Submitter posted the story for self-gratification?
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I'm pretty sure he had it right... after all, it's what the ad sites live for.
Better carry on using this... (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
At least that's not threatened by permafrost melt.
I guess it wasn't designed to last 1000 years... (Score:3, Insightful)
The seed vault was supposedly designed to last 1000 years without human intervention. If you believe in AGW, or even if you don't, it is inevitable that over 1000 years we would see a substantial change in climate. That means the possibility that the Nordic location of the seed vault may be considerably warmer than it currently is.
That is, if you're planning for the vault to last 1000 years without human intervention, then the 7C variation that flooded the entrance to the vault should be considered nearly inevitable during that 1000 year span. Hell, I'd plan for at least a 20C swing; we've seen similar swings in the past few thousand years, and it's not entirely implausible we would see more variation in the future.
Further, if I were the researchers who man the vault, I would make plans to periodically open various seed samples (perhaps by requiring any seed cultivars to be supplied in multiple packets, so one can be occasionally sacrificed for testing). This way you can evaluate if the seeds we are storing are still viable, or if something happened to them which may question the viability of the entire sample--and if that happens, hopefully we'll have time to store a new sample in its stead. (The FAQ [croptrust.org] suggests this is not happening: "The boxes with seeds will be sealed by the depositors and will not be distributed to or given access to by anyone other than the depositors.")
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Even without climate change, it's silly to think there won't be a string of unusually warm years leading to a situation like this.
The dominant industry on Svalbard is coal mining (Score:2)
Surely there's an abandoned working somewhere inside a mountain, well above sea level, that would make a better location for the repository than a tunnel in permafrost.
Didn't consider rain? (Score:2)
The level of incompetence.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Just looking at the pictures ( https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com] ) of the vault itself its apparent these people have no idea what they are doing:
1. The plastic boxes are not waterproof in the event of a flood the entire supply will be compromised
2. There are no cages in place to keep the plastic containers from falling off the shelves in the event of an earthquake or flood, and compromising their integrity
3. The ground floor is permafrost - not actual concrete or any sort of reinforced material, so any lifeform that is capable of digging can penetrate this 'vault'
Before pointing at incompetence.. (Score:2)
Any "life-form" that decides it wants to dig through a lot of ice.
Before pointing at incompetence it may have been a good idea to consider what the word permafrost means and to lay off on the science fiction. Sure, it happens a lot in movies and novels that some alien thing tunnels throug
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Nope he's doing fine. Maybe you are the one in need of education. There are animals that burrow in permafrost, look it up.
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There are animals that burrow in permafrost, look it up.
So I did, utterly fascinating.
How do animals adapt to permafrost? What are some examples? [quora.com]
Life, uh, finds a way.
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You missed a word - "lot" (Score:2)
Try again and see what you missed last time. Clue - it's a three letter word that suggest magnitude instead of whether something happens at all or not at all. Maybe consider how deep this vault is and how much permafrost a fox or whatever would have to dig through.
There's a bit of a difference between digging one metre through frozen soil and ten.
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You are the one who needs to sober up, the place has tunnels to it. How convenient for rodents who burrow in permafrost and moreover whose waste and corpses melt even more than what they themselves dig.
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What's with the "the one in need of education" insults from idiots these days? Is it some form of projection?
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The access tunnels go through tens of meters of ground, the rodents have a head start.
You spew without researching facts, that is the need for education.
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Sorry, but I thought the whole reason this article was written was because the "permafrost" melted.
So I guess the question is, if permafrost melts is it still called permafrost? Is it like ice-9 in your imaginings? Forever frozen, even when its warm?
Also, you have got to love the hubris of calling something "perma-anything." Like with people who don't want tattoos because "They are permanent!" No, they are not. You are not. Just like permafrost. Thinking so reveals a deep disconnect with reality. A
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Surgery, lol. Try lasers, welcome to 20 years ago. Latest is variable wavelength which can zap all colors, it destroys the color molecules directly.
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"If there was a worst case scenario where there was so much water, or the pumping systems failed, that it made its way uphill to the seed vault, then it would encounter minus 18 [degrees celsius] and freeze again. Then thereâ(TM)s another barrier [the ice] for entry into the seed vault," Fowler says. In other words, any water that floods into the tunnel has to make it 100 meters downhill, then back uphill, then overwhelm the pumping systems, and then manage not to freeze at well-below-freezing temperatures. Otherwise, there's no way liquid is getting into the seed bank-so the seeds are probably safe."
As for volcanic activity, the area is geographically dead [nasa.gov]. We know the areas with volcanic activity and tectonic plates meet and that won't significantly change in the next 1000 years.
Design for Disaster (Score:2)
I'm a bit surprised that they didn't design the facility to be able to automatically and passively deal with flooding. This would make point #1 (flooding) a non-issue.
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Worse, it is basically right next to the ocean. That is as bad as the stupid people that build houses on the beach and then are surprised when it falls into the ocean.
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To refute your points:
1. If the facility is flooded, the seeds will go above -18C which will ruin them.
2. They selected a geologically stable area.
3. While a few things may dig in permafrost, nothing is going to suddenly decide, "I'm going to dig a few hundred meters through permafrost because, well, I sense something is in that general direction." Also, permafrost is almost as hard as concrete, so not much would be gained by pouring it - and pouring concrete in -17C isn't a trivial task.
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"1. If the facility is flooded, the seeds will go above -18C which will ruin them."
This is very species specific. For example, I've been able to germinate with around 90% accuracy seeds of Lithops and certain species of Cactus that were over 20 years old, but I'm not disagreeing with you in general though that a good proportion will more quickly lose viability, though it really depends on how quickly those species do lose viability - if most seeds are viable for a year (which is fairly common, given the pre
Not QUITE The Real News (Score:1)
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/... [townhall.com]
Ferret
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https://www.croptrust.org/our-... [croptrust.org]
Ferret
Darwin and Nobel (Score:2)
Government Accountability (Score:1)
So this appears to the result of climate change, but big oil would like to tell you otherwise through a number of its 'anti-climate change' shell companies. At the same time the government is being asked to reduce regulation, for industries who are not socially responsible. In the case of the US government this is pretty blatant, along with ignoring the commitments it has signed up to.
Can the government be legally held accountable for actually reducing its ability to live up to its environmental obligations
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Oil doesn't matter. Seeds don't matter. In 100 years we'll have genetics completely computerized (probably sooner) so you can custom design organisms. You'll only see these things in a zoo, or a virtual zoo. What care do we have for moving back from the ocean when robots will do all the work as we sit in our virtual reality pods, if not uploaded fully?
We can less predict life's advancements in 100 years than 1900 could today's. It would be silly for them to do stuff which slowed their advancement in fa
Worse things than flooding... (Score:2)
Well, you heard it here first, folks... (Score:2)
Well, you heard it here first, folks...
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.
Global warming is not a global disaster. They designed the vault to protect against any global disaster, it didn't protect against this; therefore this is not a global disaster.
The logic is irrefutable (and looney).
Sensationalist, disingenuous article (Score:5, Informative)
This is an annual occurrence , as explained by one of the creators of the vault [popsci.com]:
“Flooding is probably not quite the right word to use in this case,” says Cary Fowler, who helped create the seed vault. “In my experience, there’s been water intrusion at the front of the tunnel every single year.”
Fowler wasn't at the seed vault this year when the flooding (or 'flooding') in question took place, but has extensive knowledge of the project and facilities. He explains that a 100 meter long tunnel leads into the heart of the mountain where the seed vault is stored, running at a slight downward slope. At the base of the slope are two pumping stations to remove any water that might get in. Then there's a slight uphill section before you reach the doors to the vault itself, where the seeds are kept at 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit or -18 Celsius.
“The tunnel was never meant to be water tight at the front, because we didn’t think we would need that,” Fowler says. “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.”
Broken design.. (Score:2)
And yet, for some reason beyond comprehension, they feel that a pumping station is a better idea than making the first ten meters of the tunnel slope slightly upwards (when looking in..), and therefore be self draining?
I wonder where they got the pumps with 1000 year service life, along with the never-fail power supply.
Someone dropped the ball here, luckily it would be an easy fix.. Just recut the first ten meters or so of the tunnel to slope correctly (you would gain an odd ceiling profile, but that should
Yes it wasn't? (Score:2)
So it flooded but didn't get flooded. Neat.
And like all best laid plans... (Score:2)
... nature shows you that you missed an important detail.
Fukashima anyone?
As boulet pointed out above, why the heck are the seeds not in airtight containers?!?!
I can just imagine... (Score:2)
I can just imagine the thoughts of the workers as they attempted to enter the vault, built deep inside a mountain in the attic circle, chipping away ice inside the seed vault facility removing ice caused by 'global warming'...
Seems to me the issue is not the vault, which was not breached, nor the temperature fluctuations that caused permafrost to 'melt' only to freeze in the vault's ante room, but instead was the pin-headed decision to build the vault facility to NOT be water-tight.
The temperature drop was
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Remember: if there is an unusually warm few days or weeks, it's because weather and climate are linked.
However, if it is unusually cold (as we saw a few winters ago in the Eastern United States with snow in Atlanta), weather is not climate. (Unless, of course, increased climatic energy is causing larger variations in weather--meaning global warming is making the Earth cold.)
Seems to me that's exactly what is happening.
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I don't know what's sadder, someone who actually accepts money from oil companies to shill against global warming or the useful idiots who do it for free because they think they're smart.
Climate is the average of weather. One cold snap doesn't mean anything more than one hot spell. If the hot spells outnumber the cold spells and record hot events are happening far more often than record cold events the the climate is clearly warming.
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Sure.
And if we accept the IPCC's own data on global warming, then we are now experiencing a world that is approximately 1 degree (celsius) warmer than the baseline average.
Which means the other 6 degrees celsius that caused melting at the seed vault was.... what, exactly?
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Still global warming. First: the estimates have gone up lately on how much global warming we are experiencing and second: a lot of that warming is happening locally. And Antarctica is one of the areas most affected (there are other places where the average temperature is colder or not rising, e.g. due to more rainy days).
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Are you legitimately too fracking stupid to understand what a global *average* is?
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Sure. mean(t) = sum(t) / N. (And thank you /. for stripping the sup, sub tags and summation signs.)
What puzzles me is the presumption that an increasing mean implies an increasing range.
For example, if you have a data set ( 1, 3, 3, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2 ) with a mean (average) of 2, and an external force increases the mean (average) by 1, giving us a new set ( 2, 4, 4, 3, 4, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 3 ) with a mean (average) of 3--then why the assumption somewhere in the range of data there should be a 9?
In fact,
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What's sadder is people who blame 'oil companies' like we're permanently living in 1988.
Because they think they're smart.
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Nope. A few weeks proves nothing about climate. When the weather changes consistently, and things happen fairly frequently over a period of years that almost never happened before, that's climate.
It almost never rained in winter when I was a kid. Now that I'm older and in the same city, we've had fairly frequent rain in winter for quite a few years now. That's probably climate change, but of course
Global Cooling is more worrisome (Score:2)
Frankly I'd be far more worried about global cooling than global warming.
The reason is that the colder the Earth gets, the shorter the growing season gets. The shorter the growing season, the less food we harvest.
And we are literally one harvest away from global starvation.
You don't think all that fresh food on the shelves of the grocery store will last a year, right?
I suspect one reason why the more alarmist activists who are pushing global warming as a political agenda (as opposed to the scientists resear
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The left doesn't conflate "weather" with "climate"...
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In an attempt to plan for an apocalyptic event, they were were caught off guard by this apocalyptic event?
This apocalyptic event is one of the slowest ever theorized, so its impossible to plan for.