The entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault flooded after record temperatures and heavy rainfall. Photo: Crop Trust
Just over 800 miles from the North Pole, humans built something called the Doomsday Vault. It’s a foreboding name, but it’s a pretty damn good idea. The point of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is to make sure that, in the event of some giant global crisis, a huge variety of plant seeds will still be available. It is a fortress built to stand the test of time, but rapidly melting ice just about ruined it.
The vault’s construction cost $9 million, but users who want to store seeds there don’t have to pay a thing. Norway, along with an organization that’s mission is to protect global crop diversity called Crop Trust, pay for the operating costs. The Crop Trust is funded by a variety of governments and a few rich organizations, like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s buried deep in a mountain in the Arctic Svalbard archipelago. “This is supposed to last for eternity,” said Åsmund Asdal at the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre, which operates the seed vault, to The Guardian.
The vault is buried deep in a sandstone mountain.
So here’s what happened. Although the Svalbard Vault was designed to withstand pretty anything nature could throw at it, it wasn’t designed for a whole bunch of rain in the Arctic. With record-breaking heat engulfing the area, a vast amount of ice melted, and instead of snow, there was rain. The entrance to the vault flooded, then froze when the temperature dropped.
“It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that,” Hege Njaa Aschim, from the Norwegian government that owns the vault, told The Guardian.”It was supposed to [operate] without the help of humans, but now we are watching the seed vault 24 hours a day.”
Luckily for the humans of the future, none of the seeds were damaged, and the ice in the vault’s entrance has since been hacked out. Construction is ongoing to find a solution to a problem that is rapidly getting worse, including pump installation, drainage culverts, and waterproofing.
