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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.
"impregnable deep freeze" ... "[T]he vault's planners had not anticipated the extreme warm weather seen recently..."
Feels like a bit of an design oversight for a "failsafe" to only work if everything is going fine.
Permafrost obviously cannot be relied on now, so the need to keep it in the artic circle can be dispensed with. You might as well split the stocks into batches and secure them in several locations across the world. Since they're refrigerated, those places don't need to be cold even.
IMHO, you keep a lot of seeds, the climate shifts, those seeds are for plants that are no longer useful because the world has shifted. A new disease evolves, it wipes out plant stock, your seeds are not immune. They're not going to save us, just a useful source of diverse seed DNA for some future repairs.
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No Seriously ?
Can they ???
Their string of technical failure is embarrassing - and they want to re-engineer ALL of society ? ......
instead of science.
and those seeds will make a very enjoyable jungle!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I find it absurd they did not take into account melting permafrost, current temperatures are not even close to historical highs we have been able to determine. It was always going to get warmer than this at some point, how could they not account for any melting?
I wish instead they had build somewhere a bit less transient and more geologically stable.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
“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...
The designers knew the difference between "hottest year ever _recorded_" (that is, within the last few hundred years) and the hottest years _ever_. The arctic has been a lot warmer than now during _this_ interglacial (source: Marcott et.al 2013) - not to mention the previous interglacial, the Eemian.
it's in my head
They lied, they got some money. The lie cost money so now they want some more. It's not going to end the cycle you know.
As I mentioned last time this little gem came up..
Just dig out the first 20 meters of the tunnel to slope downwards?
The ceiling doesnt matter, it can slope up, there may be very minor water trickle in that way.
However, having a floor sloping upwards (from the interior end..) was always pure incompetence.
Easily rectified - would probably take a good solid week to achieve with no major impact on the sites operations.
And yet, someone, they need to spend 1.6 million to 'investigate' this?
I guess its a nice tasting gravy train...
As can be seen from this image of the site:
http://img.timeinc.net/time/photoessays/2009/seed_vault/seed_vault_01.jpg
They may need to compromise the pretty look of the entrance a little, but is that what really matters?
... to such a poor underdevloped country like Norway.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Couldn't they just do the same things people up north do to keep the snow from flooding their basements, install a pump? Maybe a few pumps, so there's some redundancy in the system?
But no... they need a multi-million dollar new tunnel. And here in the good old USA, the city won't even fix the fricken potholes.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
He's been on the TV. One of the doomsday freaks. Like I tell him every time I see him buying stuff he'll never use, if it happens, you'll be dead soon enough. He laughs. Crazily laughs. He still has Trump signs out.
The downside is that you have to enter from Australia.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
In computers we call secondary backup in case primary backup fails. Instead of spending $4.5m, Spend that to create a suitable secondary site further north from lessons learnt from primary site.
They should have given the design contract to a British Civil Nuclear Engineering firm. I've worked for a few of them, every decision is made wearing tinfoil hats, it's pretty bad. I've seen designs that would work safely regardless of any nearly impossible weather conditions, they then added additional independent safety features so that it would work for something several times worse. I can't see how they would have missed this particular hiccup, it would have had the ramp falling away from the door, a pumped drainage solution as backup and nearby emergency submersible vessels to gain entry after the ice caps have melted.
The very definition of permafrost is that it is continuously frozen. I blame Trump.
I wish instead they had build somewhere a bit less transient and more geologically stable.
And miss out on the regular "near disaster" to get another multi-million bonus? That would be bad business.
Yeah: it debunks the whole idea of global warming being some massive conspiracy doesn't it - or do the time travelling zombies behind the global warming myth forget to send these guys a memo?
That is NOT why it was build and nobody believes it can do that. The reason it was built was to make sure the biodiversity wasn't lost is a Monsanto single strain catastrophe. This place doe NOT have enough seeds to work as out seed for the entire planet.
What do you mean? The location was picked _because_ it is geologically stable. There's no tectonic activity, it's at high enough altitude to remain above sea level even if the ice caps should fully melt, and permafrost safeguards against refrigeration failure.
The recent flooding of the entrance was caused by surface melt, not thawing of the subterranean permafrost surrounding the vault itself. Once the water entered the tunnel and flowed deeper, it froze. Even if it should heat up enough up there to kill off the permafrost entirely, the subterranean nature of the vault still eases the refrigeration needs.
Is who Trump would blame!
catchup: stupid
Trump will just build a yuge great wall around the vault to protect the seeds from the melting permafrost. The Mexicants won't pay for it but the Mexicans will.
Build it on top of a fucking mountain.
What kind of quarterly gains are they going to get from a seed vault? How stupid are they?! When large bands of the Earth turn to deserts from climate change it will be money that everyone wants! ;)
(nb4 "*whoosh!*" comment response)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
They did take into account higher temperatures. With higher temperatures comes less buildup of permafrost which is less likely to melt. What they didn't take into account was a few uncharacteristically warm days amid a time of thick snow and frost causing a sudden melt.
Weather != climate.
You cannot defeat entropy in the long run. All victories are temporary and require effort.
E Proelio Veritas.
at the end of the world's hottest ever recorded year
The absurdity of that statement is just astounding, how quickly we forget that the earth use to be covered in blistering hot magma.
They build the seed vault to protect the Earth's plants in the event of an environmental disaster ... like climate change.
However, the vault, itself, isn't immune to the effects of said climate change.
Somebody wasn't thinking.