Humanity’s ‘doomsday’ seed vault seems to be safe for now
Conflicting stories abound after water seeps into trove buried in Arctic mountainside
On Friday, a slew of alarming headlines emerged regarding the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Water had apparently breached this “fail-safe” trove of the planet’s seeds that is supposed to protect earth’s food supply in the event of a “doomsday” scenario.
The alleged failure of the vault, buried deep into an Arctic mountainside, had occurred after warmer than usual temperatures had caused a layer of permafrost to melt, “sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel” and presumably putting the world’s most diverse collection of crop seeds at risk, according to the Guardian.
“Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts,” the newspaper announced.
“The Arctic Doomsday Seed Vault Flooded. Thanks, Global Warming,” Wired stated.
Though water did get past the vault’s threshold, none of the seeds had been damaged. But a spokeswoman for Statsbygg — a group that advises the Norwegian government, which owns the vault — cautioned that it might only be a matter of time before they were.
“A lot of water went into the start of the tunnel and then it froze to ice, so it was like a glacier when you went in,” Statsbygg spokeswoman Hege Njaa Aschim told the Guardian of the water breach. She added that officials were now observing the seed vault around the clock to “minimize all the risks and make sure the seed bank can take care of itself.”
“The question is whether this is just happening now, or will it escalate?” Aschim asked.
On Saturday, Statsbygg seemed to walk back some of those comments in a statement published on the seed vault’s website. Yes, there had been “seasondependent intrusion of water” into the outer part of the seed vault, but the group was now taking precautionary measures to make improvements to the outer tunnel to prevent future occurrences.
“The seeds in the seed vault have never been threatened and will remain safe during implementation of the measures,” the statement read.
According to the statement, the proposed improvements include removing heat sources, such as a transformer station, from the tunnel, as well as constructing drainage ditches on the mountainside to prevent meltwater from accumulating around the entrance. In addition, waterproof walls would be erected inside the tunnel. Finally, to be “better safe than sorry,” Statsbygg says researchers will closely follow the development of permafrost on Svalbard.
“The seeds are safe and sound,” tweeted the Crop Trust, an international nonprofit group that helped establish the Svalbard vault in 2008.
So which is it? Is the fact that some water seeped into a “fail-safe” vault no big deal? Or are we as a human race doomed to die, starving and cropless, in the event of global catastrophe?
The answer is more measured. Representatives for Statsbygg and Crop Trust did not immediately respond to an emailed interview request Saturday. However, Crop Trust on Saturday twice retweeted a Popular Science article that seemed to indicate the situation was not as dire as had been initially reported.
“In my experience, there’s been water intrusion at the front of the tunnel every single year,” Cary Fowler, an American agriculturist who helped create the seed vault, told the magazine.
Though he was not at the vault to observe the incident, he noted that “flooding” was probably not the most accurate word to describe what happened.
“The tunnel was never meant to be watertight at the front, because we didn’t think we would need that,” Fowler told Popular Science. “What happens is, in the summer the permafrost melts, and some water comes in, and when it comes in, it freezes. It doesn’t typically go very far.”
However, that doesn’t mean that the underlying cause for the melting permafrost — warming temperatures — should be ignored.
“At the end of the day we have to realize that in a sense, everything is relative with this initiative,” Fowler told the magazine. “This whole planet is warming, and that includes Svalbard.”