The “Doomsday Seed Vault” opens
February 26, 2008 at 10:53 am 1 comment
The Norwegian government announced the opening of the “Svalbard International Seed Vault”, carved deep into frozen rock on an island not far from the North Pole.
The entrance to the “fail-safe” seed vault will “gleam like a gem in the midnight sun,” signaling a priceless treasure within: seed samples of nearly every food crop of every country. The vault is designed to protect the agricultural heritage of humankind — the seeds essential to agriculture of every nation.
The purpose of the “Agricultural Noah’s Ark” is to conserve the seeds that will allow agriculture to adapt to challenges such as climate change and crop disease. The Arctic seed vault is part of a comprehensive global strategy being implemented by the Global Crop Diversity Trust to protect collections of crop genetic diversity around the world.
Construction is began in March 2007 and to was completed in September 2007.
The site was chosen, in part, because the ground is perpetually frozen, providing natural back-up refrigeration that would preserve the seeds should electricity fail. Yet, even here, project architects had to consider how to offset the potential impacts of climate changes.
The design will accommodate even worst-case scenarios of global warming in two main ways. For one, the vault will be located high above any possible rise in sea level caused by global warming: the vault will be located some 130 metres above current sea level, ensuring that it will not be flooded. This puts it well above a seven metre rise that would accompany the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet, or even a 61 metre rise that could accompany an unlikely total meltdown of Antarctica.
Secondly, scientists determined the impact of rising air temperatures on the permafrost, which is normally between -4°C and -6°C (24.8°F and 21.2°F). They found that the permafrost would warm much more slowly than the air. In addition, the deeper into the mountain, the colder it will remain. Therefore, the vault will be located an extraordinary 120 metres into the rock, ensuring that rising external air temperatures will have no influence on the surrounding permafrost.
“Even climate change over the next 200 years will not significantly affect the permafrost temperature,” says project manager Magnus Bredeli Tveiten, with Statsbygg, the Norwegian government’s Directorate of Public Construction and Property.
To accomplish this, the 120-metre entry tunnel will penetrate through the permafrost, opening to two large chambers capable of holding three million seed samples. The tunnel and vaults will be excavated by means of well-known boring and blasting techniques, with the rock walls sprayed with concrete.
In contrast to this utilitarian interior, “the exterior structure shoots out of the mountainside,” Tveiten said. The entrance portal will be a narrow triangular structure of cement and metal, illuminated with artwork which changes according to the special lighting conditions of the Arctic. In the summer months, the entrance “will gleam like a gem in the midnight sun,” Tveiten says. Throughout the dark winter, when the sun never rises, it will glow with gently changing lights.
Security measures include several sets of reinforced doors between the entrance and the chambers, the absence of windows, and a video monitoring system.
Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
More info
Video
Footage from the inside of the vault:
More images on the construction work:
Entry filed under: Nature, Science, Technology. Tags: doomsday, global warming, norway, seed vault, seeds, Svalbard.
1.
Chuck early | May 2, 2012 at 11:09 pm
Say civilization is over as we know it; all are dead but a handful, how would they get there for one; if they do, how will they get in the vault to get seeds and carry to the climate to start over ?
Thank you
Chuck Early