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Multi-Million Dollar Upgrade Planned To Secure 'Failsafe' Arctic Seed Vault (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The Global Seed Vault, built in the Arctic as an impregnable deep freeze for the world's most precious food seeds, is to undergo a multi-million dollar upgrade after water from melting permafrost flooded its access tunnel. No seeds were damaged but the incident undermined the original belief that the vault would be a "failsafe" facility, securing the world's food supply forever. Now the Norwegian government, which owns the vault, has committed $4.4 million to improvements. [T]he vault's planners had not anticipated the extreme warm weather seen recently at the end of the world's hottest ever recorded year. "The background to the technical improvements is that the permafrost has not established itself as planned," said a government statement. "A group will investigate potential solutions to counter the increased water volumes resulting from a wetter and warmer climate on Svalbard." One option could be to replace the access tunnel, which slopes down towards the vault's main door, carrying water towards the seeds. A new upward sloping tunnel would take water away from the vault. An initial $1.6 million will be spent on investigating ways to improve the access tunnel, with the group's conclusions delivered in spring 2018. "They are going in with an open mind to find a good solution," said Aschim. "$4.4 million is for all the improvements we are doing now." The vault cost $9 million to build.
It is both sad and embarrassing to see how all the anti-environmentalists and the arm-chair philosophers join forces (again) to start kicking, when their perceived enemy of the moment is apparently lying down. Maybe you can elaborate on your own expertise in major construction work in the high Arctic? I think it is pretty likely that whoever built this site were qualified for the job, so I will go with their opinion on the matter over yours any time of the day. Permafrost melting isn't exactly a new, surprising phenomenon, and both the Russians, the Norwegians and the Canadians are aware of the issues and will no doubt have taken that into the totality of their considerations.
The world's seed banks are of huge importance. Not only are we losing bio-diversity very fast at the moment, but we are also losing genetic variety in all our food crops, which makes us more vulnerable to emerging plant-diseases, pests etc. As just one example, take the banana: nearly all the bananas we see in supermarkets come from the Cavendish variety, which is now under serious threat from a fungus disease. And calling it a variety is probably a bit of a misnomer - Cavendish bananas don't produce seed (or only very rarely), and all the plants are clones of just 1 original plant, so they are genetically identical. Whatever kills one is likely to kill all. The seed banks are there to preserve the genetic variety of food crops, to protect us against something like this happening to wheat, rice, maize, potatoes etc etc. Even if you are meat eater, you don't want to loose the crops that feed the cattle that feed you.
And we are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that we can ill afford to lose the natural eco-systems, since much or even most of what we grow for crops, depends on them being at least somewhat intact; so the seed vaults' work in preserving wild plant species is also very important. This is definitely not just a bunch of tree-huggers wasting tax-payers' money. If you are looking for waste of tax-payers' money, look no further than to propping up an unnecessary coal industry or giving tax breaks to the wealthy.