Seed Vault under threat

Photo taken from here.

Ahhhhh, sounds like some of our calculations were off. Protect those seeds, but yet our own efforts were thwarted by our own behavior.

Unusually high Arctic temperatures caused permafrost to melt and seep into the “Doomsday” seed vault—a fail-safe trove intended to protect food supplies in case of a global calamity—it was revealed last week. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is buried in a frozen mountain on a Norwegian island, stores some 500 million seeds from around the world. But late last year temperatures soared on Svalbard, pushing the permafrost around the vault above melting point. Water seeped into the entrance tunnel, but didn’t reach the seeds. “It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there,” said Norwegian official Hege Njaa Aschim.

Taken from the June 2, 2017 print edition of The Week Magazine.