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Norway to Build Doomsday Seed Bank
Kagu writes "According to the BBC, Norway is planning to build a Seed Bank in the Artic Permafrost to protect all known variations of seeds in case of worldwide disaster." From the article: "Mr Hawtin said there were currently about 1,400 seed banks around the world, but a large number of these were located in countries that were either politically unstable or that faced threats from the natural environment."
Anyways, the world is dying because the resources were squandered by humans. As a last resort, we package our genetic material into the nose cone of a rocket and fire it blindly into space (colder than the artic tundra).
Would it be such a bad idea to launch seeds into outer space to orbit the world just in case? I mean, they have to be worth something to us, right?
From the article:I hope there's a foot of lead included in that shielding somewhere. To me that would seem the most vital shielding they could provide.
My work here is dung.
So where can i deposit my seed?
http://www.cushingproductions.com
...Oh wait, that kind of seed. I better lay low for a while...
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
In the words of Lorelai Gilmore...
dirty!
see this and think sperm bank?
Why would a politically unstable country have a seed bank? I can't imagine caring much about how oak trees fare if my government was on the brink of collapse...
//I'm also kind of curious what countries they consider to be "politically unstable."
Hmm, what a coincidence, I was just preparing a sample of my seed, where do I send that again?
One more target to add to my list!
Mwuhahahah!
Is this the promised end? Or image of that horror? KING LEAR
... it was alredy on digg.com
That's old news.
KFG
... they have some good pot seeds frozen. Why should post-apocalyptic pizza stores go bankrupt?
Trolling is a art,
Where are moderator points when you need them?
Oooh, matron.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
This is not lame.
I'm on it!
A lot of seeds die if they are ever frozen, and no seed has an infinite shelf life. After a geologicially short time all the DNA of the seeds will break down. So unfortunatly this isn't going to do any good if we humans kill our planet.
As far as I know, the arctic permafrost is already melting - which implies that the seeds will not remain frozen for very long.
And I'd suppose there would be flooding issues involved where there is a lot of melting water. So, they will probably succeed in creating an underwater chamber of moldy grains then?
Is the arctic permafrost really the best place? Doomsday might be caused by the polar ice caps melting, in which case the seeds will float away.
I was gonna bitch about it being a dupe, til I realized it wasnt a dupe, just already posted on Digg, as you point out.
I didn't find it all that interesting, but somehow got over 1100 digs. The US has a "seed bank" as well, as do many other countries.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
More elaborate article on this can be found at NewScientist.com. Some sketches (2) over the vault available on the online Norwegian newspaper TV2 Nettavisen.
Also, I'm a bit disappointed that BBC missed out on the whole "security-details provided by roaming polar bears"-thing.
-= Ho Eyo He Hum =-
congrats slashdot!
Doomsday Sperm Bank...
I think its a good idea too.
Donaters: Ready... Set... Go!
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
That's what she said.
Score: +1, Nasty
We need to include the other half - animals.
DNA repositories like CRES.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
yes but this one is not in a politicaly unstable country.
*ducks*
1) Top Soil Storage -- Enough to dilute the nuclear fallout and to bury the bodies of the passed as well as provide sufficient nutrients for plant growth.
2) Water Supply -- Unless whatever is causing the damage will filter water.
3) Source of Light -- That volcanic ash could certainly block out needed sunlight.
4) Parking Garage -- Fer yer John Deer and other machinery (unless the human toll was minimal - labour = food)
5) Dummies Guide to Farming -- Tony Blair, George W, and all our favourite characters will get a spot in a safe location. To that I say, save the farmers.
6) Apiary -- Most plants require Pollination.
The above is by no means a complete list.
Thank goodness we have the seeds. Now I don't mean to be extremely critical since in many cases it could be sufficient. However it would be prudent to consider other requirements for growth other then just the seeds.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
the thing
sure putting all that genetic material in the frozen wastelands sounds like a good idea, but then you get mutant sled dogs wandering away from the destroyed frozen norwegian science outposts, and pretty soon kurt russell has to fire up the flamethrower and do some genetic mutant ass kicking
sorry, this seed bank idea is bad news
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Wonder if: A) they're going to store Pot seeds and if so, B) just one type, or a sample of the various types (well over 1k honestly)....
cool idea, even if they won't do those sort of naughty seeds. (bad seeds, go to bed!)
..doomsday suddenly arrives, do we really want seeds to be the only thing that survives?
How about a clone bank so that if we hit doomsday clone production starts and asures the survival of humanity?
And if things get really bad we can always eat our clones.
Babys: the other OTHER white meat. --fatbastard
Isn't one of the reason one might want such a seed bank that the icecaps could melt?
And yet that's where they're putting them.
Hmmm.
Named after Nikolai I Vavilov, a Russian biologist, botanist and geneticist, the Institute's seed collections were largely built by Vavilov who scoured five continents in the 1920s and 1930s for wild and cultivated corn, potato tubers, grains, beans, fodder, fruits and vegetable seeds.
Hitler's army blockaded Leningrad (now St Petersburg). Under German fire, scientists gathered unripened potato tubers from the Institute's experimental fields outside Leningrad. They burned everything they could find to keep the collection from freezing in the building.
While guarding the collection, some scientists starved to death rather than eat the packets of rice, corn and other seeds in their desks.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
all the grains necessary for making vodka, whiskey, and most importantly, BEER!
Do they save instructions on how to make the plant grow? When I read the article, I didn't see anything about that.
Some seeds need to go through certain animals in order to be able to germinate. The seed bank might not be so valuable if they screw this up.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Read: "If plant conservationists produced as many biological and chemical weapons as physicists have produced bombs, then perhaps there would be some scraps in the treasury left over for them."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_device
[Obligatory Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb quote]
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I wonder if they really thought this thing through or just got carried away in their zeal. The permafrost is melting worldwide. In 50 years there will not be much left in the arctic.
...just put a sign: "Caution: Genetic Material Repository. No dogs allowed".
That should do it.
Grundes!
I prefer to think of it as security of the species. Come on, hear me out...
Picture this.... several hundred thousand years from now...
A series of archaeologists from the now dominant evolved-from-Dolphins species that runs the planet finds a mysterious encased tomb. Cracking their way through the concrete covering, they find a collection of primitive seeds. Despite the training provided by their utopian society, enroute to the museum a couple of seeds manage to blow away and germinate in the soil nearby. Slowly but surely, plants from a long-forgotten era slowly grow and displace the native flora. Despite their best efforts, the native flora is rapidly killed off, being entirely unsuited to compete against these primitive plants. The rapid change in the flora leads to a collapse of the entire food chain, and subsequent extinction of the dolphin race.
And then us monkeys get another crack at it! Take that Dolphin overlords!
I dunno, this seems a bit silly all round. I mean if there is a catastrophe sufficient to wipe out all seed and food crops in the world, or at least within easy reach, it's not very likely that there will be a whole lot of anything or anybody else to replant and eat said food crops. On top of that, its fairly safe to assume the disaster would have pretty much erased whole ecosystems; are the food crops sufficient to maintain a viable ecosystem by themselves? Kind of a waste of money, really.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg189253 43.700
I think it's really more about preserving genetic diversity rather than being a hedge against world-wide disaster.
WTF is an artic?
JourneyExpertApe writes "There are fetuses that can spell better that Kagu. And Zonk couldn't spot a spelling error if it had a wavy red line under it. Also, "seed bank" and "permafrost" aren't proper nouns, so they shouldn't be capitalized."
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
I'm also kind of curious what countries they consider to be "politically unstable."
The USA?
Please stop stalking me, bro.
...we become the next generations intelligent designer?
I love humanity, it is people I hate
Marshall T. Savage, a while ago, proposed a rather interesting idea for preserving life that I think would work as a great parallel project to this:
In this boldly optimistic manifesto, Savage proclaims a master plan for the human race: to spread life throughout the galaxy. To many, space exploration seems irrelevant to Earth's real problems; but humanity may in fact have no other way to secure its long-term survival. To remain confined to Earth, Savage claims, is to court extinction, possibly within a few decades. Savage (an engineer who has established the Millennial Foundation to promote space exploration) outlines his program for transferring a significant portion of humanity off-planet. The crucial first step is to colonize the ocean surface with floating cities, quadrupling the living space available to the growing population of Earth. This allows us to reverse the degradation of the environment by shifting to the thermal energy of the deep ocean as our primary power source. At the same time, spirulina algae (already on sale in health food stores) becomes a major new food crop. The hardware for these oceanic colonies is already within practical reach: Savage provides a detailed inventory of how his floating cities would work and support themselves, with copious citations of the scientific literature. Once this move is well underway, it frees up energy and resources for the next steps. Improved space vehicles make possible orbiting space colonies, then settlements on the moon. A larger step is terraforming Mars--creating an atmosphere and a water supply for our lifeless neighbor to form a human habitat. On an even longer time scale, the race can expand into the rest of the solar system: asteroids and the moons of other planets. Ultimately, artificial habitats may completely surround the sun. With the resources of an entire solar system at our command, according to Savage, humanity can at last send out emissaries to other stars. The stuff of science fiction? Of course--but rigorously built from existing science, carefully documented, and convincingly argued. Highly recommended.
It is notable that many Chinese died of starvation during the revolution when they were in charge of allocating food to the masses. One can have nothing but total admiration for this, admittedly, suicidal act in the face of adversity. Perhaps, this consideration might moderate some of the more rude and ignorant comments we see around here.
I think you're right. Arguably it's a good idea, whether or not the organisms themselves are ever grown, because the DNA may have interesting genes in it that future biotechnologists might want to study and use, when we get to the point where we're able to not only "read" a genome easily but with full comprehension.
It's for this reason that the actual viability of the seeds isn't maybe that much of an issue. So long as the DNA remains intact and can be sequenced, it will be useful.
Although...I wonder if they might not be better off spending the money on sequencing the genomes now. That data can then be stored in many different places, and probably far more compactly and easily than the seeds. Furthermore, I think the mol bio field generally agrees that in the not too distant future it should be relatively straightforward to understand gene function from sequence, and that means only the sequence is really needed anyway. We won't need the actual DNA itself, because we can always reconstruct it, or the part of it we need.
Basically I'm saying maybe preserve all these plant species virtually, in cyberspace, instead of actually, in the frozen tundra. Cheaper. As well as more cyberpunk.
If you get an ion drive going, it can reach relativistic speeds in comparatively little time. Launch it on a parabolic orbit, set to intersect earth every 500 years or so. Launch another one every 50 years.
As speed->infinity, time->0, and so the seed'sll be preserved a lot longer that way.
A simple challenge to you: if you're simply laughing at the prior sentence, then consider that you will die should it happen. If you're not laughing and you're seriously considering the effects, you too would consider a little biodiversity...
Judging by the sperm bank jokes and general paucity of insight (except for that mono-culture Monsanto post and a couple others), this seems to indicate that this is not really news for nerds.
Now, an article about a pizza and soda bank--*that* would be "News for Nerds"!!
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
MONsanto/MONoculture. Coincidence?
I'm also surprised very little has been said so far about the dangers of creating a monoculture. One bad wheat blight and we'll all be hungry.
Speaking as someone who has tried to grow things from seed, it's important to remember (these people likely understand this) that posession of seeds by no means insures the preservation of a plant species. Roses, for example, are seldom grown from the seed. Many plants are propagated by grafting, and having the seeds is no guarantee the species is 'preserved' in this way. It's very difficult to grow some species by seed.
That should be ragnarok, nothing else.
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
...please seeed!! I am stuck at 99% :(
I don't know why. A Lancaster bomber and a Grand Slam would be sufficient. (Yeesh, those things could punch through a 20' reinforced concrete wall! They would use this combo, in WW2, to literally chop up U-Boat pens.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The perfect place for such a bank. Norway has no natual disasters, and has no enemies. Who would want to take over a country full of 90% ice and snow?
I kill harmless processes for sport
You can always count on Norway!
**Wipes tear from eye**
I whole heartedly agree! It's a perfect example how idiotic the drug laws are here in the US of A. A horrible addictive neurotoxin like alcohol is easily available and legal, and yet, something as benign as pot will get you years in jail and your property seized.
Politicians are retards and do not deserve or have they earned my respect!
Pot is bad for your health if you smoke it. Like anything else the smoke inhalation has its consequences. Brownies baby!
The past few years we've seen universities trying very hard to find old races/ strains of for example apple trees because the present ones seem to be more suspect to pests than it used to be.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
things change... that's the way of life! the only ecosystem that is at equlibrium is a climax. every other system is NOT at equilibrium and therefore living... generating new species and dying out on some other parts.
... they do not exist at their own. everything is linked. you cannot restore a whole such system by simply bringing back the plants. for a start: how would they fix nitrogen from atmosphere? this is done by bacteria in most cases that grow in plants.
... want yet another illustrating example: imagine this: lets assume, we have put a dinosaur, a raptor, in cryo some milion years ago and now we decide to restore its population. we thaw it up again, make it mate with another dino of other sex and let them have children. now try to find a place in our modern world, where they would be able to reestablish a population... maybe a city like new york or tokyo? or london or paris or kolkata? 18milion humans and 150 raptor dinosaurs in same habitat... would this be possible? probably not. the time has passed and things changed. the raptor has no chance to exist in our world. this will be probably the most frequent fate of such imaginary experiments, because of the fact that life cannot be preserved but only prolonged and even that has its limits... ;-) ... think about that!
if you save seeds, you did do a snapshot of available species at a certain time under certain conditions. sure plants can grow under a lot of conditions but don't rest on the fact that now we will have a global seed-bank in a stable cold place and now we can destruct the whole ecosystems of this planet just becasue we have the seeds to re-establish it back. this is NOT the case. plants are highly dependend on animals, bacteria, virii,
better let's keep the ecosystems we have now more or less stable and try not to destroy them completely than relating on seed-banks for conservation.
don't get me wrong: seed-banks are very valuable tools for research and agriculture, but not for longterm conservation!
Building a doomsday seed seems a bit risky.
What happens if it gets lost? or a bird eats it then shits it onto an innoscent park some where.
1 year and a little water...kabooom!
just to risky...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...including Norway, right? I think it's based on Spetsbergen...
into what direction ?
How are survivors supposed to retrieve the seeds?
the few individuals that are left would rather plant seeds than repopulate the world....
If the earth tumbles into a catastrophic state large enough to kill off vegitation as well as mankind, i am sure there will be no seed that will survive. But it sounds like a nice attempt to fool mother nature.
This has been another valuable and informative opinion from:
Catahoula!
It will be more like this:
The seeds will have developed strange mutations over time. The dolphins will plant the seeds and find that they germinate and grow, literally overnight The dolphins will each sample their favorite vegetables, only the find that each one develops some super-dolphin powers. The dolphin that eats carrots will develop super vision. The dolphin that eats the spinach, super strength. The dolphin that eats the sugar beets will develop super swimming speed, etc. etc. The dolphins will later eat soap to cure their conditions and remain trapped on the island.
Having not taken Murphy's Law seriously enough, the brave Norwegian seed guardians first notice Doom as a distant whistling noise.
Say, Gunter, vot is zat zound? Asks Olaf.
Vhy, I dunno! Says Gunter. It sounds almost like a vhistle!
They ponder the problem for a few seconds, and look out the window of the seed bank guard tower where they were having lunch a minute earlier. Gunter speaks first.
Olaf, there is a very strange circular shadow on the ground. It covers ze whole base!
Yes, I see, Gunter, what can zis mean?
Both men look up. The meteor Doom hangs over their heads for an instant, just like the big evil sphere in The Fifth Element, improbably rotating with a very slight cant, and then descends. Unfortunately there is no Wild Hottie available to save them... All the models are in New York for "Fashion Week". The meteor falls directly on them, squashing them all as flat as a day-old tostada.
The resulting release of energy wipes out all the plants on Earth, and the survivors think, "yeah, we should have seen it coming... Doesn't it always happen that way?"
Monsanto and others try fool with mother nature. The problem is mother nature cannot be fooled or fooled with very long without dire results.
I think the approiate phrase that applies here, for those that try to trick mother nature, would be:
This has been another valuable and informative opinion from:
Catahoula!
My country is pretty politically unstable...
Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?
but a large number of these were located in countries that were either politically unstable or that faced threats from the natural environment
Permafrost isn't in danger? My FORD DEMOLISHER begs to differ.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
please, please, please come take him away. better you than me.
Svalbard, of which Spitsbergen is an island, is a complicated case politically -- sort of like the Antarctic where signatories to the treaty of Svalbard can have a research or economic presence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard.
Norway's sovereignty is not in question, but it is under constraint. The Russians mine coal there (among other things). Norway has huge oil reserves in the North Sea and wants to move drilling into the Arctic ocean. The Norwegians have a strong interest in developing Svalbard and have a heavy presence in Longyearbyen. There is a developed tourist trade for people like me and my crazy wife who rode snowmobiles six hours to Berentsberg (The Russian Settlement) in a whiteout last Easter. But how many idiots like us can they count on?
Now, put in this context, the seed project makes a lot more sense. It is a good thing to do, of course, but at root there is the matter of "presence" not to mention all that oil and gas up there. And let's not forget those pesky Russians who also have interests.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
It's interesting how strongly persistent natural selection makes life forms. On Planet Earth, life forms have advanced so far in their ability for self-persistence that they've evolved sentient beings who then developed technology to allow them to gird the seeds of life for survival against the most extreme of natural disasters.
Philosophistry
The guy spent TWO FREAKING DECADES collecting that stuff. Folks guarding it realized it would only last them a few days, so chose not to destroy a valuable scientific artifact. This is HEROISM folks, in its purest form. Not "firefighter" flavor cultivated here in the US.
Mod the parent Insightful.
Where can I get some? Mwahahaha.
Have you heard about the Microsoft Seed Bank?
how a testing post got +2 and all my anonymous coward
never got higher then 0?
...or sperm bank?
For reference, you might want to try this Wikipedia article.
Does anyone else think that this is a little silly and a LOT expensive? Above threads pointed out that in the case of a world extinction event getting to the seeds would be hopeless so is it worth the money? Granted if just a hemisphere or something was nuked then it could have a use. It just seems like the chance of it being of any help is far outweighed by the cost, I would hate to give my taxes to something so far fetched.
Oh so ronery...
uh...duuude....there's, like, other ways to grow plants besides in the ground...
it's called hydroponics, greenhouses, etc...
this is a good idea, not a waste of money
Thank you Dave Raggett
Dont forget my seed its pretty important
A good example is with potatoes -- there are about 200 different varieties of potato, but my understanding is that only four or five of them are seriously grown on a large scale in the US.
Heirloom vegetables are still grown on a small scale just about everywhere. Plants are prolific seed producers, so it'd only take a season or two to get enough seeds for everyone.
Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers: Marginality and Memory in the Conservation of Biological Diversity
The author of this book has traveled around the world, doing research on "seed savers", generations of people who farm, save and share their own seeds.
Also see The Meat You Eat by Ken Midkiff, for how Agribusiness makes us all unhealthy.
I found both books at my public library. Well, I wasn't looking for those particular titles at the time, so I guess they actually found me.
Organic seed companies are a good source for heirloom varieties. Seeds of Change, for example.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
"Permafrost"
I thought we would need to keep all the best cannibis strains in order to enjoy our last year on the planet as a the fallout from the disaster surrounds us.
why would I want a bank of Doomsday Seeds? Sounds dangerous.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Just like so: 8===D--.O-:
It's always encouraging to see people planning ahead like this.
We should freeze all our Windows CDs so that if Windows becomes unusably crap and a meteor (with associated EMP) wipes out all the backups of old versions of windows we can just dig our win 98 CDs out of the permafrost and play Minesweeper while the rest of the world starves to death waiting for Vista to start up.
This is the type of plan that will "suck-seed". I am soooooo drunk!
Gunter: Mayday! Mayday! Ein riesiger MeteorIST im Begriff, unsere Unterseite zu schlagen und die Samenansammlung zu ruinieren! Wir wissen nicht was zu tun! Aller, den wir haben, ist drei Feuerlöscher und ein Supereinweicher!
Ishmael, a Norwegian Ship Captain who happens to be in the vicinity: Eu imploro seu pardon, mas sendo norueguês, eu não compreendo o alemão. Ou é esse Hindi? Talvez Francês?
Ramaswami, a French Fighter Pilot passing by: Hé, vous types! Est-ce que quelqu'un a dit le français? Nous nous rendons!
Mickey Futz, a Maltese plumber who vacations in Brooklyn: , ! I'm you're !
Ramaswami: Bien, c'était simplement grossier. Je vais mettre le feu à un airstrike!
Mickey Futz: Don't Frenchie !
Ramaswami: Ah, mon Dieu! Nous nous rendons! Nous nous rendons! vous aiment un certain brie?
Gunter: Ich bin, Mäuler so schrecklich traurig, aber Sie verwirklichen, daß ALLE wir sind, die GEHEN ZU STERBEN!!!
Ishmael: Deus, Gunter, você é tal rainha do drama. Coloque fora o café... O Oh, hey, é que um meteoro?
Gunter: JA!
Ishmael: Oh, caro. Você são realmente parafusam, não são você? Oh, bem, você está em nossos pensamentos.
Gunter: Gee, Dank. Ich werde zu Bett gehen.
NOTE: The Japanese text that was produced for Mickey's dialogue seems to have been stripped out. Sigh...
Gunter the seed guard: Mayday! Mayday! A giant meteor is about to hit our base and ruin the seed collection! We don't know what to do! All we have is three fire extinguishers and a Super Soaker!
Ishmael the Norwegian Ship Captain: I beg your pardon, but being Norwegian, I don't understand German. Or is that Hindi? Perhaps French?
Ramiswami the French fighter pilot:Hey, you guys! Did somebody say French? We surrender!
Mickey Futz, the Maltese Plumber: Can the chatter, all you degenerates! I'm trying to fix the toilets on this freighter here and you're screwing up my satellite radio with this nonsense!
Ramiswami: Well, that was just rude. I'm going to fire an airstrike!
Mickey: Don't make me come up there, Frenchie!
Ramiswami: Oh, my God! We surrender! We surrender! Would you like some brie?
Gunter: I'm so terribly sorry, chaps, but you DO realize we're ALL GOING TO DIE!!!
Ishmael: God, Gunter, you're such a drama queen. Lay off the coffee... Oh, hey, is that a meteor?
Gunter: YES!
Ishmael: Oh, dear. You really are screwed, aren't you? Oh, well, you're in our thoughts.
Gunter: Gee, thanks. I'm going to bed.
Seeds don't really last very long (yes, there are documented exceptions)...how are they preserving their long term viability? (I don't want to RTFM :-)
now all we need to do is build a giant ark, move the seeds in with every species on the planet. "The NOAH 2000 is THE technological ark of the future!"
I'll make you a deal. You pray to God for help and I'll stop the moment he shows up.
Don't mean to shock anyone, but the Arctic is not exactly a Friendly Natural Environment.
Well consider the following: one of the worlds richest nations, third largest exporter of oil and gas, vast natural resources, a *small* army armed with American weapons like F-16s etc - next door to Russia...
I certainly don't agree with your sentiments - Norway feels very much in control of Svalbard with the treaty in hand. The only other issue is of course the conflict with Russia and Iceland over fishing in the waters surrounding Svalbard. Now, establishing the seed bank on Svalbard would not change anything in that regard! Every major and minor nation party to the treaty including Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom (including overseas dominions) and the United States, Russia and Germany recognize Norwegian sovereignty over these islands. It's the sea surrounding it and the territorial limits that we expanded that they don't fully agree with!
Svalbard is populated... slightly. But they're all well equipped for surviving the environment. They have practically everything they need - and don't need like visiting cruise ships. There's even a university centre for research!
I hope there's a foot of lead included in that shielding somewhere. To me that would seem the most vital shielding they could provide.
There's nothing magical about lead. It's more dense so it takes up less volume than other shielding but sufficient mass of almost any material also work as radiation shielding. A few meters of concrete or frozen earth will do nicely, thank you.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
AFAIK seeds don't last forever, which is why seed banks periodically replant and harvest seeds. I remember this coming up with some marijuana seeds (no joke) at some conservatory in Russia or something. Might be a good thing to search for on smokedot, if it wasn't using slashcode with its attendant super-shit search tool.
I read an article about the Japanese government overseeing 1000 plants to preserve the cultural heritage, they'd harvest the seeds then destroy the plants. I think the article was in "Vice" or "Fader" magazine. I can't find the article in my vast pile of zines right now and the best link I can find in a quick google search is dead... but I got a link to the Google cached article. Though in this article it states the plants are for medicinal research. Cannabis (or asa as they all it) was a huge part of the Shinto religion and a staple crop in Japan due to it's many industrial uses. It only became illegal after the US wrote them a new constitution after WWII.
If that were the case, we'd better tell the permafrost that it should stay frozen. Because, if you haven't heard, it is melting right now.
And if you ask if that is bad, well, scientists estimate that fourteen percent of the worlds carbon is stored in permafrost. Fourteen percent of ALL carbon, not only of the CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. And it is mostly in the form of methane, which upon release, would increase the greenhouse effect considerably. See also positive feedback loop.
Keep open minded - but not that open your brain falls out...
Unrelated note:
At this point, everyone is talking about something you'll be surprised about, too.
it just seemed logical in the context that they might be referring to the US. I think overly patriotic people need to take chill pills, and stop flaming, so that I can say reasonable shit and not get modded flame-bait.
Please stop stalking me, bro.