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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."
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?
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 =-
Permafrost =/= ice caps/glacier.[br][br] Permafrost is solid soil that stays frozen because of the climate. Even if the polar ice caps did melt, most permafrost exists at high altitude, and will stay frozen and unaffected if the polar ice caps melt.
D'oh! Songhua river, not Harbin (city it runs through)
Here in Canada pot is pretty nearly legal. Small amounts get you a wee fine, no jail time or anything silly like in "free" countries. :)
Trolling is a art,
The smartest thing we can hope to do probably is map out the DNA for every endangered species, in the hope that one day we will be advanced enough to synthesize this DNA again "de novo" in a lab and bring the species "back" if we ever need it.
This probably wouldn't be enough. Although in a sense an organism's DNA has all the information needed to construct the organism, the DNA sequence is just a string of data. Construction of the organism requires (very, very complex) interaction between this data string and a "reader" (the cell). While the fundamental code of the DNA (translation to proteins) is fairly consistent across most organisms, the regulatory mechanisms (among other things) which are essential for life vary pretty widely. If you had cells from a closely related organism, you might be able to make it work, but then if you had a closely related organism, it probably wouldn't be so important in the first place.
An (admittedly poor) analogy: If you had a single jpeg file and no knowledge of the jpeg format, how easy would it be to recreate the original image?
Anyway, my point is that it's important to keep in mind that there may be as much information content in the "reader" as in the the "data", even when the data has enough information for the "reader" to construct duplicate "readers".
There have been a few times where diseases and plagues have almost removed almost all of a certain plant.
Dutch Elm disease.
Most all grape vines were destroyed by blight in Europe and actually come from vines in the United States.
The SouthEast used to be covered with deciduous trees and not these ugly southern pines -- a lot more Black Walnut -- which is now pretty rare.
Anywho -- this project makes a lot of sense. Some species could become extinct while we are preoccupied -- either with a large war or while trying to combat droughts and storms of a severe nature. I could see a lot of scenarios where we would have to deal with a lot of global emergencies and turn around and find we have no more of a certain species -- even a common one.
I hope they do genetic samples, plasm, and embryos of many animals as well. Ideally they would just organize them by ecosystem -- grab everything from a specific area and preserve a small representative patch (freeze-dried and vacuum sealed).
As well as lead lining -- add some graphite for good neutrino safety.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
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!