I get that climate change is a problem but this article reads like they blame it and man-made effects 100%. Shouldn't the vault be very well constructed against things like this, especially since it's supposed to stand for decades without human intervention?
The headlines at that time were largely sensational. Some precisions were made later: the seeds were never in danger, only the beginning of the tunnel was flooded. The tunnel is long and it is there precisely for this reason.
Totally. The vault is supposed to stand up to unseen man-made disasters, and variability in a known trend caused a breach in integrity?
I'm not sure this says that global warming is much faster than predicted by the most aggressive models 10 years ago, as it says the vault was simply not designed well.
I applaud the cause, but for a worldwide backup, it does suggest more resources/design could have been used.
I saw Cary Fowler speak last week. He's the guy that organized the Svalbard vault. He said the news reports on this were highly inaccurate and exaggerated. Their was a small amount of water in the opening area, but it got no where near the actual seeds. A fix is already in the works.
I kind of wonder the utility of something like this, if crops get wipe out for whatever reasons, I am sure finding new viable seeds will never be a real issue compared to fighting whatever wipe out the crops in the first place.
That is a really simplistic way to think about this. Most of the crops that we grow today were perfected after millenia of selective breeding and cannot be found in the wild. So the only place you can find them are in human granaries and fields grown and maintained by humans. Without humans to harvest and cultivate these crops (fertilizers, tilling, irrigation) most of the crops would likely perish.
Although it sounds horrible, I can certainly imagine a scenario in which some kind of catastrophe would wipe out a large section of the human race, and perhaps most of our farmers/crop growers as well. A decade after this catastrophe if a post-apocalyptic human race gains some kind of political stability, it would be immensely useful to have this kind of vault to restart agriculture.
I see them less as agriculture starter kits and more as archives of genetic information. Perhaps a climatic catastrophe reaches a new equilibrium after 200 years. A bunch of plants have gone extinct or are so hard to find they might as well be extinct. Civilization suffers a near fatality, but recovers just enough to trek out to those seed vaults. The seeds might serve an important role in breeding projects. It's maybe not the highest utility contingency, but it mitigates risk of permanent loss of genetic information.
I saw Cary Fowler speak last week. He's the guy that organized the Svalbard vault. He said that the seeds are regularly tested. They are rotated when their germination rate goes below 85%.
Cool and dry sorta they have had some issues due to climate change overall it’s hust seeds in boxes kept at low temperatures they don’t need special storage other than a nominally sterile environment to prevent rot and other environmental issues such as mold, fungi and other pests feeding on them.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/19/arctic-s...