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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 problem is not a single event but rather the fact that it occurred given the likelihood of such event actually occurring. Or, to put it differently, as long as "unusually warm" means "minus five degrees", it was all fine.
Ezekiel 23:20
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
At least that's not threatened by permafrost melt.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
It seems permafrost is no longer permanent, even in Svalbard up near the north pole.... 7 degrees celsius above normal.
Wow.
Yes, with a sign that says "Your welcome" in all the world's languages.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Everyone thought I was daft to build a seed vault in the permafrost... but I built it all the same!
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.")
I know, I know.. read the signature.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
“We did this calculation; if all the ice in the world melted—Greenland, Arctic, Antarctic, everything—and then we had the world's largest recorded tsunami right in front of the seed vault. So, very high sea levels and the worlds largest Tsunami. What would happen to the seed vault?” Fowler says. “We found that the seed vault was somewhere between a five and seven story building above that point. It might not help the road leading up to the seed vault, but the seeds themselves would be ok."
http://www.popsci.com/seed-vau...
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
Surely there's an abandoned working somewhere inside a mountain, well above sea level, that would make a better location for the repository than a tunnel in permafrost.
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.
I don't know what's sadder, someone who actually accepts money from oil companies to shill against global warming or the useful idiots who do it for free because they think they're smart.
Climate is the average of weather. One cold snap doesn't mean anything more than one hot spell. If the hot spells outnumber the cold spells and record hot events are happening far more often than record cold events the the climate is clearly warming.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The earth has been an incandescent gas before. But this doesn't mean that we should expect the earth to be gaseous in the next ten thousand years.
Remember, all you AGW deniers were claiming all through 2001 to date how it was going to go back to an ice age (or at least the 1950's average) "any day now". So when they believed your BS, it's their fault you were wrong?
So a vault designed with protecting something through a catastrophe didn't consider the possibly of melt water or lots of rain? Was the director of design Donald Trump?
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.
Just looking at the pictures ( https://www.theguardian.com/en... ) of the vault itself its apparent these people have no idea what they are doing:
1. The plastic boxes are not waterproof in the event of a flood the entire supply will be compromised
2. There are no cages in place to keep the plastic containers from falling off the shelves in the event of an earthquake or flood, and compromising their integrity
3. The ground floor is permafrost - not actual concrete or any sort of reinforced material, so any lifeform that is capable of digging can penetrate this 'vault'
...Dry Valleys. That's where it should have been built, if you're serious about 'long term'.
In an attempt to plan for an apocalyptic event, they were were caught off guard by this apocalyptic event?
This apocalyptic event is one of the slowest ever theorized, so its impossible to plan for.
"His name was James Damore."
Any "life-form" that decides it wants to dig through a lot of ice.
Before pointing at incompetence it may have been a good idea to consider what the word permafrost means and to lay off on the science fiction. Sure, it happens a lot in movies and novels that some alien thing tunnels through a lot of ice, but outside fiction nothing is munching on frozen mammoths or anything else in the permafrost because it's too damned difficult to get to the things.
Turns out this was mostly over-sensationalizing from a badly translated story:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/...
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
The folks who planned this should be given the Darwin award. May be Nobel too. They are worthy of both.
Tat Tvam Asi
yeah, those mj seeds sure make you forget to do things...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
The obvious mistake was not sending the seeds off to a planet that is 75-light-years away, where aliens and corporations would squabble over Earth's genetic legacy in the future. Check out "City of Pearl" by Karen Traviss, the first of six volumes in The Wess'har Wars series.
The left doesn't conflate "weather" with "climate"...
Well, you heard it here first, folks...
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.
Global warming is not a global disaster. They designed the vault to protect against any global disaster, it didn't protect against this; therefore this is not a global disaster.
The logic is irrefutable (and looney).
hell i almost forgot to respond to this.
This is an annual occurrence , as explained by one of the creators of the vault:
“Flooding is probably not quite the right word to use in this case,” says Cary Fowler, who helped create the seed vault. “In my experience, there’s been water intrusion at the front of the tunnel every single year.”
Fowler wasn't at the seed vault this year when the flooding (or 'flooding') in question took place, but has extensive knowledge of the project and facilities. He explains that a 100 meter long tunnel leads into the heart of the mountain where the seed vault is stored, running at a slight downward slope. At the base of the slope are two pumping stations to remove any water that might get in. Then there's a slight uphill section before you reach the doors to the vault itself, where the seeds are kept at 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit or -18 Celsius.
“The tunnel was never meant to be water tight at the front, because we didn’t think we would need that,” Fowler says. “What happens is, in the summer the permafrost melts, and some water comes in, and when it comes in, it freezes. It doesn’t typically go very far.”
Oil doesn't matter. Seeds don't matter. In 100 years we'll have genetics completely computerized (probably sooner) so you can custom design organisms. You'll only see these things in a zoo, or a virtual zoo. What care do we have for moving back from the ocean when robots will do all the work as we sit in our virtual reality pods, if not uploaded fully?
We can less predict life's advancements in 100 years than 1900 could today's. It would be silly for them to do stuff which slowed their advancement in favor of protecting the environment.
Full Earth trantorization now! Because I love humanity.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I'm a bit surprised that they didn't design the facility to be able to automatically and passively deal with flooding. This would make point #1 (flooding) a non-issue.
Yep, you'd think with a that WATER around it, they'd have a contingency plan. Some drains? Pumps?
Still global warming. First: the estimates have gone up lately on how much global warming we are experiencing and second: a lot of that warming is happening locally. And Antarctica is one of the areas most affected (there are other places where the average temperature is colder or not rising, e.g. due to more rainy days).
“Flooding is probably not quite the right word to use in this case,” says Cary Fowler, who helped create the seed vault. “In my experience, there’s been water intrusion at the front of the tunnel every single year.” http://www.popsci.com/seed-vau...
Sounds to me that they just forgot to keep the snow sloped away from the entrance.
But that of course doesn't provide the clicks like climate change disasters does.
It should be both. Government incompetence at accounting for global warming. Without one or the other there would be no problem.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Oh wait.... we're trusting the guys who create and sell patented GMO seeds to keep the original seed DNA? What's next, vampires running the blood-bank?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
So it flooded but didn't get flooded. Neat.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
Are you legitimately too fracking stupid to understand what a global *average* is?
And that will not wind up warming up the vault when in operation?
... nature shows you that you missed an important detail.
Fukashima anyone?
As boulet pointed out above, why the heck are the seeds not in airtight containers?!?!
And yet, for some reason beyond comprehension, they feel that a pumping station is a better idea than making the first ten meters of the tunnel slope slightly upwards (when looking in..), and therefore be self draining?
I wonder where they got the pumps with 1000 year service life, along with the never-fail power supply.
Someone dropped the ball here, luckily it would be an easy fix.. Just recut the first ten meters or so of the tunnel to slope correctly (you would gain an odd ceiling profile, but that should not matter).
Of course it will never happen, because then someone would have to admit they made a mistake..
Try again and see what you missed last time. Clue - it's a three letter word that suggest magnitude instead of whether something happens at all or not at all. Maybe consider how deep this vault is and how much permafrost a fox or whatever would have to dig through.
There's a bit of a difference between digging one metre through frozen soil and ten.
Sure. mean(t) = sum(t) / N. (And thank you /. for stripping the sup, sub tags and summation signs.)
What puzzles me is the presumption that an increasing mean implies an increasing range.
For example, if you have a data set ( 1, 3, 3, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2 ) with a mean (average) of 2, and an external force increases the mean (average) by 1, giving us a new set ( 2, 4, 4, 3, 4, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 3 ) with a mean (average) of 3--then why the assumption somewhere in the range of data there should be a 9?
In fact, the fact that the mean (average) has incremented by 1, this does not imply that somehow the range (which in the old set was 1 through 3) somehow must then go from -5 through 9.
Yet, that seems to be what you are implying with your comment
See, this is why I really dislike politicized discussions, and inevitably any discussion about global warming becomes politicized: because often most people seem to check their brains at the door.
Frankly I'd be far more worried about global cooling than global warming.
The reason is that the colder the Earth gets, the shorter the growing season gets. The shorter the growing season, the less food we harvest.
And we are literally one harvest away from global starvation.
You don't think all that fresh food on the shelves of the grocery store will last a year, right?
I suspect one reason why the more alarmist activists who are pushing global warming as a political agenda (as opposed to the scientists researching the topic) have stopped using the phrase "greenhouse effect" is because we build greenhouses in order to increase crop yield. And the phrase would seem to imply that by adding CO2 and additional warmth and humidity to the world, we are making the world more favorable to longer growing seasons and larger crop yields.
I can just imagine the thoughts of the workers as they attempted to enter the vault, built deep inside a mountain in the attic circle, chipping away ice inside the seed vault facility removing ice caused by 'global warming'...
Seems to me the issue is not the vault, which was not breached, nor the temperature fluctuations that caused permafrost to 'melt' only to freeze in the vault's ante room, but instead was the pin-headed decision to build the vault facility to NOT be water-tight.
The temperature drop was temporary, since the melted permafrost soon froze again, hence the ice workers had to remove...
Ken
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
Why did the melted permafrost freeze over if the world keeps getting warmer? The permafrost melted, seeped into the rooms around the seed vault, then froze solid - how did that happen after 'incredible temperature increases'?
Ken
This is the month of May. Arctic thawing peaks in September. In May, the thaw is barely beginning....
That _is_ the point. In May, all the H20 should be solid, not liquid, at least based on previous year's records and the solid scientific assurances from Exxon-Mobil since the 1970s that global warming is a liberal lie.
Temperature goes both ways, up AND down. Even if the temperature of the Earth rises 3 degrees and all the ice melts in the Antarctic, we will still have summers warmer than winters and days with variable temperatures.
It's bizarre how believers will close their eyes to basic facts in order to maintain some sort of perverse equilibrium with whatever cult belief they've latched onto.
Maybe Algore needs to pay them a visit?
My clever plan would involve pumping out the water before it freezes.
Nope. A few weeks proves nothing about climate. When the weather changes consistently, and things happen fairly frequently over a period of years that almost never happened before, that's climate.
It almost never rained in winter when I was a kid. Now that I'm older and in the same city, we've had fairly frequent rain in winter for quite a few years now. That's probably climate change, but of course says very little about global warming.
In this case, something happened that had been considered almost completely impossible. One characteristic of climate change is that extreme events move from the nearly impossible to the highly improbable, so one unbelievable event happening does provide evidence.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes