Multi-Million Dollar Upgrade Planned To Secure 'Failsafe' Arctic Seed Vault (theguardian.com) 53
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The Global Seed Vault, built in the Arctic as an impregnable deep freeze for the world's most precious food seeds, is to undergo a multi-million dollar upgrade after water from melting permafrost flooded its access tunnel. No seeds were damaged but the incident undermined the original belief that the vault would be a "failsafe" facility, securing the world's food supply forever. Now the Norwegian government, which owns the vault, has committed $4.4 million to improvements. [T]he vault's planners had not anticipated the extreme warm weather seen recently at the end of the world's hottest ever recorded year. "The background to the technical improvements is that the permafrost has not established itself as planned," said a government statement. "A group will investigate potential solutions to counter the increased water volumes resulting from a wetter and warmer climate on Svalbard." One option could be to replace the access tunnel, which slopes down towards the vault's main door, carrying water towards the seeds. A new upward sloping tunnel would take water away from the vault. An initial $1.6 million will be spent on investigating ways to improve the access tunnel, with the group's conclusions delivered in spring 2018. "They are going in with an open mind to find a good solution," said Aschim. "$4.4 million is for all the improvements we are doing now." The vault cost $9 million to build.
Failsafe? (Score:1)
"impregnable deep freeze" ... "[T]he vault's planners had not anticipated the extreme warm weather seen recently..."
Feels like a bit of an design oversight for a "failsafe" to only work if everything is going fine.
How to save 1.6 mllion dollars.. (Score:3)
As I mentioned last time this little gem came up..
Just dig out the first 20 meters of the tunnel to slope downwards?
The ceiling doesnt matter, it can slope up, there may be very minor water trickle in that way.
However, having a floor sloping upwards (from the interior end..) was always pure incompetence.
Easily rectified - would probably take a good solid week to achieve with no major impact on the sites operations.
And yet, someone, they need to spend 1.6 million to 'investigate' this?
I guess its a nice tast
Re:How to save 1.6 mllion dollars.. (Score:4, Insightful)
It is both sad and embarrassing to see how all the anti-environmentalists and the arm-chair philosophers join forces (again) to start kicking, when their perceived enemy of the moment is apparently lying down. Maybe you can elaborate on your own expertise in major construction work in the high Arctic? I think it is pretty likely that whoever built this site were qualified for the job, so I will go with their opinion on the matter over yours any time of the day. Permafrost melting isn't exactly a new, surprising phenomenon, and both the Russians, the Norwegians and the Canadians are aware of the issues and will no doubt have taken that into the totality of their considerations.
The world's seed banks are of huge importance. Not only are we losing bio-diversity very fast at the moment, but we are also losing genetic variety in all our food crops, which makes us more vulnerable to emerging plant-diseases, pests etc. As just one example, take the banana: nearly all the bananas we see in supermarkets come from the Cavendish variety, which is now under serious threat from a fungus disease. And calling it a variety is probably a bit of a misnomer - Cavendish bananas don't produce seed (or only very rarely), and all the plants are clones of just 1 original plant, so they are genetically identical. Whatever kills one is likely to kill all. The seed banks are there to preserve the genetic variety of food crops, to protect us against something like this happening to wheat, rice, maize, potatoes etc etc. Even if you are meat eater, you don't want to loose the crops that feed the cattle that feed you.
And we are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that we can ill afford to lose the natural eco-systems, since much or even most of what we grow for crops, depends on them being at least somewhat intact; so the seed vaults' work in preserving wild plant species is also very important. This is definitely not just a bunch of tree-huggers wasting tax-payers' money. If you are looking for waste of tax-payers' money, look no further than to propping up an unnecessary coal industry or giving tax breaks to the wealthy.
Re: How to save 1.6 mllion dollars.. (Score:3)
Which is trickier: Building a vault to protect against global warming, and not having its entryway freeze when the surface gets a little warmer, or re-engineering the global economy to reduce GHG emissions without starving more people?
Excuse us skeptics if we think the second one is harder, and that blinding incompetence in the first suggests that the people in question might not do any better on the second.
Re: (Score:2)
Any complex construction project needs to take into account a large number of requirements and parameters; some of these may be in conflict with each other, so the engineers have to make compromises based on the best of their knowledge. In some cases the simply have to guess, because they still don't have strong enough data. It is presumptious, to say the least, to pass judgment without knowing more about how they made their design choices.
Pure guesswork, but I can imagine a reason why it would make sense t
Re: How to save 1.6 mllion dollars.. (Score:2)
It's funny. You sit here telling people to not pass judgement while you, yourself, have judged them to be capable. Curiously, you've judged this and made some assumptions about competency when, frankly, evidence suggests a lack of competency.
I suspect there's some bias. Call it a hunch.
Re: (Score:2)
You sit here telling people to not pass judgement while you, yourself, have judged them to be capable. Curiously, you've judged this and made some assumptions about competency when, frankly, evidence suggests a lack of competency.
Not really - I reserve judgment until I know more, but until then I am willing to give them the benefit of doubt. After all, we give even murderers a chance to defend themselves before judging them. I think I have explained in sufficient detail why I think it is more likely than not, that they have shown reasonable competence, and I won't invest any more effort into the subject. I suspect you won't be convinced by any arguments, and I frankly don't really care.
Re: How to save 1.6 mllion dollars.. (Score:2)
You're not very observant, are you? It's okay.
Re: (Score:2)
Potato. Native to Chile, Peru, Bolivia, with a wide genetic variety finely tuned to local conditions.
Wheat. A grass, with wide natural diversity expanded by human efforts.
Rice. A grass seed, substantially improved in diversity and nutritional value by human development.
Maize (corn). There are a large number of varieties of corn organized into at least 6 categories by their economic function. Corn is also increasing its genetic variety due to human research into better strains.
While seed banks are a nice
Re: (Score:2)
Or a failure of "Titanic" proportions?
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Seed vaults already exist all over the world, the Svalbard vault is the backup in case they are lost. Hyperbolically speaking "due to global disaster". More realistically speaking, when one of the other vaults get wiped out from fire, war, floods etc.
In addition, it's intended to be self sustained. It's locally powered, and in the event of refrigeration failure permafrost still maintains below freezing temperatures (though not deep freeze, obviously), presumably ensuring seeds are viable for a long time aft
Re: (Score:2)
In addition, it's intended to be self sustained. It's locally powered, and in the event of refrigeration failure permafrost still maintains below freezing temperatures
Guess what? Permafrost isn't permanent any more. It's melting all over the place. Any design which is supposed to be long-term and which counts on permafrost remaining frozen is shit.
Re: (Score:2)
Guess what? It doesn't rely on it. The permafrost isn't anywhere near as cold as the desired storage temperature of -18 C. It is, however, nice to have, both as an energy saver and to slow the heating process in case of refrigeration failure (something being underground helps with regardless). And, until such time as it should indeed vanish, it'll keep things at -3 even in the event of extended cooling failure.
Wait a few more years (Score:3)
Those who ignore history are doomed to build in a (Score:3)
I find it absurd they did not take into account melting permafrost, current temperatures are not even close to historical highs we have been able to determine. It was always going to get warmer than this at some point, how could they not account for any melting?
I wish instead they had build somewhere a bit less transient and more geologically stable.
Re: (Score:1)
The very definition of permafrost is that it is continuously frozen. I blame Trump.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What do you mean? The location was picked _because_ it is geologically stable. There's no tectonic activity, it's at high enough altitude to remain above sea level even if the ice caps should fully melt, and permafrost safeguards against refrigeration failure.
The recent flooding of the entrance was caused by surface melt, not thawing of the subterranean permafrost surrounding the vault itself. Once the water entered the tunnel and flowed deeper, it froze. Even if it should heat up enough up there to kill of
Re: (Score:3)
They did take into account higher temperatures. With higher temperatures comes less buildup of permafrost which is less likely to melt. What they didn't take into account was a few uncharacteristically warm days amid a time of thick snow and frost causing a sudden melt.
Weather != climate.
The original design works as intended (Score:4, Informative)
“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]
The designers knew the difference between "hottest year ever _recorded_" (that is, within the last few hundred years) and the hottest years _ever_. The arctic has been a lot warmer than now during _this_ interglacial (source: Marcott et.al 2013) - not to mention the previous interglacial, the Eemian.
It's unfortunate that this happened... (Score:2)
... to such a poor underdevloped country like Norway.
Flooded basement (Score:1)
Couldn't they just do the same things people up north do to keep the snow from flooding their basements, install a pump? Maybe a few pumps, so there's some redundancy in the system?
But no... they need a multi-million dollar new tunnel. And here in the good old USA, the city won't even fix the fricken potholes.
Re: (Score:2)
They're using pumps as redundancy now, but that's really not really how the vault is supposed to work. It's intended to survive without human maintenance in case of global catastrophes. Quoting the article:
Slight disadvantage (Score:4, Interesting)
The downside is that you have to enter from Australia.
British Civil Nuclear Contractor (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
maybe they thought that i the permafrost thawed in that area, the human population on this planet was about to be fucked anyways - so that there would not really be that relevant to keep some seeds :p
"securing the world's food supply forever."? (Score:2, Informative)
That is NOT why it was build and nobody believes it can do that. The reason it was built was to make sure the biodiversity wasn't lost is a Monsanto single strain catastrophe. This place doe NOT have enough seeds to work as out seed for the entire planet.
Re: (Score:2)
You mean the things that collapse and move all the time, like the shelf on Everest that disappeared earlier this year, and which are incredibly difficult for staff to access and get parts / repairs done up there?
Try somewhere geologically stable instead, and if you put it underground, make sure the water has a path that doesn't lead straight to your main archive. We've been mining and building cellars for millennia on city-wide scales, and always managed to work it out before.
SO STUPID! (Score:2)
What kind of quarterly gains are they going to get from a seed vault? How stupid are they?! When large bands of the Earth turn to deserts from climate change it will be money that everyone wants! ;)
(nb4 "*whoosh!*" comment response)
It is hopeless (Score:1)
Let me get this straight ... (Score:1)
However, the vault, itself, isn't immune to the effects of said climate change.
Somebody wasn't thinking.