Arctic warming sparks revamp of remote ‘doomsday’ seed vault
LONGYEARBYEN, Norway — Designed to withstand a nuclear strike, the world’s biggest seed vault, nestled deep inside a remote Arctic mountain, is undergoing a makeover as rising temperatures melt the permafrost meant to protect it.
Dubbed the “Noah’s Ark” of food crops, the Global Seed Vault is buried inside a former coal mine on Svalbard, a remote Arctic island in a Norwegian archipelago around 1,000 kilometers from the North Pole.
Opened in 2008, the seed bank plays a key role in preserving the world’s genetic diversity. It is home to more than a million varieties of seeds, offering a safety net in case of natural catastrophe, war, climate change, disease or man-made disasters.
But warmer temperatures have disrupted the environment around the vault. In an unexpected development, the permafrost, which was meant to help keep the temperature inside the vault at a constant -18 C, melted in 2016.
“The summer season was (warmer) than expected. We had water intrusions in the (access) tunnel that could be related to climate change,” said Asmund Asdal, one of the seed bank’s coordinators.
The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, scientific studies show. And while Europe is at the moment experiencing a subzero cold spell, the North Pole recently registered above-zero temperatures, 30 degrees higher than normal.
Scientists say warm spells like this are occurring with increasing frequency in the Arctic.
Highlighted by war
Norway recently announced it would contribute $12.5 million to improve the repository in a bid to protect the precious seeds.
“We want to be sure that the seed vault will be cold throughout the whole year, even if the temperature continues to increase in Svalbard,” said Norway’s Agriculture Minister Jon Georg Dale.
The vault’s raison d’etre was recently highlighted by the war in Syria, when scientists were able to withdraw seeds after a seed bank in Aleppo was destroyed in a bombing.
To access the heart of the vault where the seeds are stored, authorized visitors must first pass through heavy doors and a 120-meter concrete tunnel, giving the chilling impression of delving into an Arctic abyss.
The tunnel leads to three cold chambers protected by locked gates. Inside each chamber, seeds from all over the world are stored in sealed plastic boxes labeled with the country of origin and the variety.
Outside, nothing betrays the presence of the storage site so vital to humanity, apart from a monumental entrance: the narrow cement-and-steel rectangular portal juts out of the snow-covered mountainside, illuminated with artwork made of mirrors and bits of metal that create a colorful prism visible for miles around.