Arctic World Seed Vault in grave need of Protection

Arctic storage of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melted, challenging the ability of the rock vault to provide fail-safe protection against climate change.

No seeds were damaged but the facility is now working on ways to have new waterproof walls in the tunnel and drainage ditches outside.

The storage facility deep inside the mountain was designed to impregnably protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever.

But the Global Seed Vault has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel.

The vault is on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen storing seeds from 5,000 crop species from around the world. Dried and frozen, it is believed they can be preserved for hundreds of years.

Hege Njaa Aschim, from the Norwegian government-owner of the vault, said that “It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that,” The Guardian reported.

Aschim said there was no option but to find solutions to ensure the enduring safety of the vault: “We have to find solutions. It is a big responsibility and we take it very seriously. We are doing this for the world.”

The vault managers are now taking precautions, including major work to waterproof the 100m-long tunnel into the mountain and digging trenches into the mountainside to channel meltwater and rain away. They have also removed electrical equipment from the tunnel that produced some heat and installed pumps in the vault itself in case of a future flood.

Although most countries keep their own supplies of key varieties of seeds, the Global Seed Vault acts as a back-up.