Doomsday seed vault threat
DESIGNED to withstand a nuclear missile hit, the world’s biggest seed vault, nestled deep inside an 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 about 1 000km 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 manmade 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,” Asmund Asdal, one of the seed bank’s coordinators said.
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 sub-zero cold spell, the North Pole recently registered above-zero temperatures, 30°C higher than normal.
Scientists say warm spells like this are occurring with increasing frequency in the Arctic. Norway recently announced it would contribute à10-million (R147-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,” Norway’s Agriculture Minister Jon Georg Dale said. 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.
The vault has three cold chambers where seeds from all over the world are stored in sealed plastic boxes labelled with the country of origin and the variety. — AFP