Work Begins on Arctic Seed Vault

Aryabhata writes "BBC reports that Norway is starting construction on a 'doomsday vault' in the Arctic which is designed to house all known varieties of the world's crops. The vault's purpose is to ensure survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters or climate change; and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out. 'More than 100 countries have backed the vault, which will store seeds, packaged in foil, at sub-zero temperatures. ... Norway's Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen has called the vault a "Noah's Ark on Svalbard."'"

Comments

I hate to have a jaded eye...

[Chabil Ha']

but it would really be ironic if, sometime in the distant future, the vault is broken open and actually causes the destruction of future life because of ecosystem incompatibilities. I say live and let die. The Earth seems quite adept at recovering and moving on over its billions of years. We weren't the first ones here, nor the last. We are not even a fraction of a blink of an eye to the Earth.

Re:I hate to have a jaded eye...

[RsG]

Uh, these are crop seeds. They aren't trying to preserve wild organisms or anything like that.

Domesticated crops can't even handle your average weed all that well. They aren't part of any natural ecosystem (some can't even breed without human help). They're essentially dependant on us to survive, which is exactly why we need to have a backup stored, in case we fuck up our existing stocks. How exactly would this "cause the destruction of future life"? Attack of the killer tomatos maybe?

And as for the earth adapting, who cares? The earth isn't in any danger, and never has been. There are plenty of events that would be disasterous for our species, and plenty of other events that would be equally disasterous for other species, but as you rightly say, life would adapt and continue. However, we might not be around to see it.

This vault has nothing to do with helping the earth adapt and everything to do with helping future humans adapt/recover.

The Moon

[mr_stinky_britches]

How about putting the vault somewhere on the moon? If there was a major nuclear disaster...couldn't the effects screw up the poles of the earth too?

Re:The Moon

[Rob T Firefly]

If we're clawing our way out of the muck after doomsday, we're going to have a hard enough time getting to the Arctic, much less the Moon.

Re:The Moon

[RsG]

Think smaller than that.

Anything that renders the human race extinct, by definitiion also renders these seed vaults irrelevant. This means that we mostly consider dangers arising from either war, plauge or natural disaster.

War won't affect the poles as much as it will the rest of the world. There are no strategically signifigant targets nearby to worry about. Plague that wipes out crops won't affect frozen seeds in hard to reach places. And the only natural disasters I can think of that would matter here are things like global warming and asteroid impacts - and as long as you don't build somewhere that'll flood, you should be safe from those.

The moon is much harder to get to. If we have a war, or mass starvation due to crop failure, we'd be better off with the seeds close to hand. And asteroid impacts are a much larger issue on the moon (no atmosphere to block them), as is radiation (which would sterilize the seeds), so it's not like they'd be a whole lot safer there than here.

Re:The Moon

[Surt]

War won't affect the poles as much as it will the rest of the world. There are no strategically signifigant targets nearby to worry about.

Except for the seed vault. Can't have our surviving enemies getting their hands on that. Better nuke it.

Um, stupid place to put it...

[kabocox]

Um, I don't know about you, but I'd want several of these all over the global. They may need to re-think their idea though. If major planet disease/bioterror strike wiped out all our food sources and we really needed this to reseed the global food sources, what are the odds of no one being able to get there to unlock it? Or better yet we've nuked our selves back and we know that their is the vault and close to where it is, but unforunately it's being guarded by polar bears that are hungry... O.k. long term I'd put my money on the nuclearly mutanted savages rather than the polar bear, but why not several of these on each major land mass near major crop lands? Heck, why stop at stock piling seeds? Why not stockpile tractors and fertilizer and enough resources that you could feed a major city within a year from a single stock pile?

Re:after considering all the facts

[RsG]

Actually, if you really want to get technical about it, all our crop seeds are genetically altered. Domesticated plants and animals have been bred for specific purposes for thousands of years, and artifcial selection has altered the gene pool.

In fact, half the danger to our current crops is due to genetic "monoculture", whereby the plants are all too genetically similar to each other. When you have field after field of practically identical plants, the possibility for a disease or parasite finding a niche is very high. Look at the Irish potatoe famine as an example of this.

Hence the need for backups like this. Monsanto isn't the source of the problem, though they've certainly made it worse.

All the worlds eggs in one basket

[bano]

I think it would be more prudent to have redundancy in this system.
Maybe one in the arctic, one in antarctic, one in maybe the Sahara or Gobi, or maybe under a mountain somewhere.
Thus ruling out some sort of catastrophy taking out the entire seed vault.
You would also rule out one country being in charge of the system.

Global Warming?

[dpaton.net]

"Even if all cooling systems failed, explained Mr Riis-Johansen, the temperature in the frozen mountain would never rise above freezing due to the permafrost on the mountainside."

Hmm..their backup/failsafe cooling system is permafrost. Cue the global warming inducted failure discussion.

/flamesuit on