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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."
... they have some good pot seeds frozen. Why should post-apocalyptic pizza stores go bankrupt?
Trolling is a art,
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 =-
Sounds like a challenge!
I'm forming a high skills mercenary team to go in and get those seeds.
I'll need an Olympic level biathlete , a demolitions expert, a Harrier pilot, a (preferably beautiful) horticulturist, an eskimo, a fence, and possibly an astronaut and/or a Mason.
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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!
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".
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