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Arctic Stronghold of World's Seeds Flooded After Permafrost Melts (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world's most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity's food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel. The vault is on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and contains almost a million packets of seeds, each a variety of an important food crop. When it was opened in 2008, the deep permafrost through which the vault was sunk was expected to provide "failsafe" protection against "the challenge of natural or man-made disasters". But soaring temperatures in the Arctic at the end of the world's hottest ever recorded year led to melting and heavy rain, when light snow should have been falling. "It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that," said Hege Njaa Aschim, from the Norwegian government, which owns the vault. "A lot of water went into the start of the tunnel and then it froze to ice, so it was like a glacier when you went in," she told the Guardian. Fortunately, the meltwater did not reach the vault itself, the ice has been hacked out, and the precious seeds remain safe for now at the required storage temperature of -18C. But the breach has questioned the ability of the vault to survive as a lifeline for humanity if catastrophe strikes.
And so the vault wasn't flooded.
1. The melting of permafrost ice caused by global warming. 2. The bad design or placement of The Global Seed vault. 3. The blatantly wrong click-bate title of this article..
They didn't even need to run the simulations; higher temperatures than this have occurred pre-civilization, and that has been known for decades, so they should have been prepared for this.
The seed vault was supposedly designed to last 1000 years without human intervention. If you believe in AGW, or even if you don't, it is inevitable that over 1000 years we would see a substantial change in climate. That means the possibility that the Nordic location of the seed vault may be considerably warmer than it currently is.
That is, if you're planning for the vault to last 1000 years without human intervention, then the 7C variation that flooded the entrance to the vault should be considered nearly inevitable during that 1000 year span. Hell, I'd plan for at least a 20C swing; we've seen similar swings in the past few thousand years, and it's not entirely implausible we would see more variation in the future.
Further, if I were the researchers who man the vault, I would make plans to periodically open various seed samples (perhaps by requiring any seed cultivars to be supplied in multiple packets, so one can be occasionally sacrificed for testing). This way you can evaluate if the seeds we are storing are still viable, or if something happened to them which may question the viability of the entire sample--and if that happens, hopefully we'll have time to store a new sample in its stead. (The FAQ suggests this is not happening: "The boxes with seeds will be sealed by the depositors and will not be distributed to or given access to by anyone other than the depositors.")
Remember: if there is an unusually warm few days or weeks, it's because weather and climate are linked.
However, if it is unusually cold (as we saw a few winters ago in the Eastern United States with snow in Atlanta), weather is not climate. (Unless, of course, increased climatic energy is causing larger variations in weather--meaning global warming is making the Earth cold.)
Seems to me that's exactly what is happening.
That still doesn't explain why they didn't plan for this in 2008. It's not like AGW climate panic wasn't a thing then. We've been told for as long as I can remember that exactly this was going to happen.
This story doesn't make sense. This is the month of May. Arctic thawing peaks in September. In May, the thaw is barely beginning. So either they made some astonishingly bad design decisions (unlikely), or TFA is exaggerating or fabricating what actually happened (much more likely).
In once sentence TFA says the leak is from "meltwater", and a few sentences later it blamed on heavy rain.
I remember back to the 60s. A new Ice Age is coming! We'll all freeze to death. The population bomb, too -- not enough food and the world will starve.
pffft. one manipulative prediction after another, all wrong.
What's glossed over in the story is how the 'melted permafrost' magically seeped into the vault facility (not the actual vault) and then, despite lower global temperatures caused by cow farts, Asian coal-powered generators, and cars, froze solid again.
Ken