Doomsday Bunker in Norway with millions of “archival” seeds flooded due to permafrost melting



    The climate of our planet is changing, it is obvious already for everyone. It is possible to argue about the reasons for such changes, but the fact that global warming comes to everyone is in doubt. Glaciers are melting, the average annual temperature is changing, the level of the World Ocean is rising. The ice is gradually receding, exposing the ground in those places where it has not been visible for many tens of thousands of years. In a number of regions, permafrost is melting, which leads to known problems for already constructed structures.

    One of them is Global Seed Vault. This is a shelter for the seeds of hundreds of thousands of plant species, which was built in the ice of the island of Svalbard, in its part, which belongs to Norway. Now it turned out that global warming had reached here - in the region where the shelter was built, the melting of permafrost began. And this process is so active that the entrance to the shelter flooded. The seeds have not suffered, but the fact that this structure can serve as a truly reliable storage facility is already in doubt.



    Millions of packages of seed, both wild and cultivated plant species, are now in storage. The shelter itself was built in 2008, it has already been written about on Geektimes. The initiators of the project decided that this region and the structure of the shelter itself can save the seeds even if a global catastrophe occurs on Earth (nuclear war, superepidemia, the fall of a large celestial body, etc.). Nine years later, it turned out that the shelter is not so reliable — after all, if there is water inside, then what kind of seed safety can we talk about?

    Now the temperature in the Arctic is gradually rising. At the end of the warmest year in the entire history of observations, it rained in the Arctic. Precipitation is less frequent here, and usually it is snow. But this time something went wrong and rain fell instead of snow. “The melting of the permafrost was not part of our plans, we did not think that something like this could happen in this place,” said one of the project participants.

    "At the beginning of the tunnel penetrated a large amount of water, which then froze, forming a natural glacier at the entrance," - said the project staff. Fortunately, the water itself did not penetrate the shelter, and the ice was removed by the staff as soon as possible. As previously reported, the temperature of the bunker rooms is minus 18 degrees Celsius.

    This time everything ended well. But what happened led many experts to doubt the reliability of the shelter. “It should work without human intervention, but now we are committed to monitoring the seeds 24 hours a day,” say the staff. This has to be done in order to exclude the possibility of damage to the seeds and to make sure that the microclimate and other conditions of the storage correspond to the required ones.

    If winters like this winter repeat again, the question arises as to what else might happen to the bunker. If water gets into the room, you will most likely have to seek other shelter. It is worth noting that at the end of 2016 the temperature in Svalbard was 7 degrees Celsius higher than the usual figure for this region, which led to the melting of permafrost.



    Specialists are now trying to figure out whether such a high temperature will continue to hold next winter, whether the situation may get worse and what to do next if the temperature rises. The fact is that the temperature in the Arctic and, in particular, on Svalbard rises faster than in other regions.

    Storage staff are now taking a series of measures to level the impact of warming on what is happening inside. In particular, it was decided to isolate the tunnel with a length of 100 meters, which serves as the entrance to the storage facility, from water. In addition, engineers propose to drill drainage systems so that water, in the event of its occurrence, no longer penetrates the tunnel. Also, a number of equipment was removed from here, whose work led to a slight increase in temperature. In the tunnel and the shelter itself, pumps are installed that can pump out water if it appears.

    Now the experts who take part in the project are trying to anticipate the development of events and are taking measures to prevent possible flooding of the premises.



    It is worth noting that now questionable andproject of preservation of important data of national importance of different countries. We are talking about archiving and transporting various data to Svalbard, a project in which the Norwegian company Piql is engaged. This company offered to use a special film that does not degrade for hundreds of years. The film wound on reels is not stored in the open, but in special boxes, which, in turn, are protected from external factors. Information on such media can be written only once, but no one is going to overwrite it.

    Three countries have already sent their data for recording on this tape. These are Norway, Mexico and Brazil. The list includes important documents from the national archives of these countries. “By doing this now, we provide the next generations with access to this information,” said Ricardo Marquez, head of the National Archives of Brazil.

    Probably, if the water again falls into the repository, then interest in this project will decrease. The idea itself is excellent, but the place for its implementation, as far as can be understood, was chosen not very successful. On the other hand, if there are no more temperature records of this kind, then both the seeds and the data in the bunker will not be endangered.

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