Other upgrades already in the works include the installation of drainage ditches around the vault and the construction of a waterproof wall inside the tunnel. Several changes have already been made to the vault, including moving a heat-emitting transformer station to a location outside the tunnel. But we see now, when the permafrost is not established, maybe we should do something else with the tunnel, so that is why we have this project now.” The Norwegian government’s spokeswoman for the vault, Hege Njaa Aschim, told the Guardian: “The construction was planned like that because it was practical as a way to go inside and it should not be a problem because of the permafrost keeping it safe. Early ideas include changing the direction of the tunnel’s slope to direct water away from the interior – a solution deemed unnecessary when the structure was originally built.
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“A group will investigate potential solutions to counter the increased water volumes resulting from a wetter and warmer climate on Svalbard.”Īn initial $1.6 million will be set aside for a comprehensive investigation of how to improve the tunnel, with conclusions set to be delivered in 2018. This story is posted on Independent Barents Observer as part of Eye on the Arctic, a collaborative partnership between public and private circumpolar media organizations.“The background to the technical improvements is that the permafrost has not established itself as planned,” the government said in a statement. The Global Seed Vault, for example, already had to be repaired after meltwater breached the entrance tunnel to the vault. However, with global warming, permafrost is increasingly melting throughout the Arctic, including in the Svalbard Archipelago. Its unique location and geopolitical and climatic stability make it a suitable place for long-term safe storage. The Treaty of Paris, signed by 43 nations, including the United States, Russia and China, made it a demilitarized zone in 1920. The island of Spitsbergen is part of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago situated approximately 1,300 kilometres from the North Pole. It also serves as a backup for plant breeders to develop new crop varieties. The so-called Doomsday Vault is a kind of backup plan for agriculture, in case a disaster makes parts of the planet unlivable or if the world were to suffer a catastrophe, such as a nuclear war or extreme climate change. Such cold is enough to keep the seed samples safe for at least 200 years, even without backup power. Photo: Svalbard Global Seed Vault/Riccardo Gangaleīuilt in the depths of Spitsbergen’s permafrost, the Global Seed Vault houses more than 1.1 million seed samples of nearly 6,000 plant species from 89 seed banks globally at a permanent temperature of zero degrees Fahrenheit (about -17 degrees Celsius). “By safeguarding duplicates of these invaluable collections, the Seed Vault offers an insurance policy for our common future.” NordGen staff, Fredrik Kollberg (left) and Åsmund Asdal bring new seed boxes in to final position in the Vault shelves. “The ICARDA story demonstrates perfectly the role and function of the Seed Vault,” said Norway’s Minister of International Development, Anne Beathe Tvinnereim. ICARDA also made two more withdrawals in 20 to rebuild their own collections, now held in Lebanon and Morocco, Reuters reports. They were the first to withdraw seeds from the Global Seed Vault in 2015 to replace a war-damaged collection. The largest deposit, of 6,336 seed samples, will be made by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), which had to relocate its headquarters from Aleppo to Beirut in 2012 because of the war in Syria. The future of the world’s food and nutrition security depends not only on the genetic diversity we have within the major food crops – but also on the diversity of crops that small-scale farmers rely on. We are always excited to receive new species into the Seed Vault. Gene banks from Australia, Germany, Morocco, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, Romania, Slovakia, Sudan and Uganda will store a total of over 20,000 seeds as backups to their own collections. This is the case of wheat samples from the Leibniz Institute for Plant Genetics and Crop Research (IPK), Germany, collected in the Austrian Alpine region in the 1920s – one of the oldest collections in the gene bank. The deposit will include seeds of crop species that were not previously represented in the vault, some of which are particularly rare.
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