Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts

Re:Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafro... by nonbel on Friday May 19, 2017 @03:36PM (#14378759)

>"It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel."

This story makes the design/management of that place look really bad. In 2007 the IPCC was predicting a 0.4 C average temperature rise by 2020 and about 1.0 C by 2040[1], etc. This isn't too far off from what happened[2], so this makes it look like they did not plan ahead at all.

[1] http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm... (Figure SPM.5)

[2] http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/wti

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Re:Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafro... by erentz on Friday May 19, 2017 @03:46PM (#14378818)

Time for a backup vault on the other side of the arctic in Ellesmere Island. This time maybe they can tunnel an upward slope into a stable mountain so no moisture will be able to flow in, and moisture originating inside should (in theory) flow out.

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Re:Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafro... by ajmurmann on Friday May 19, 2017 @06:27PM (#14379797)

Or fly them to the moon!

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Re:Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafro... by SAI_Peregrinus on Friday May 19, 2017 @03:47PM (#14378822)

That and saving the seeds of flowering plants without preserving eggs of pollinating insects isn't very useful.

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Re:Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafro... by pmoriarty on Friday May 19, 2017 @04:35PM (#14379120)

I remember hearing I think it was a Radiolab episode which talked of an instance where a lot pollination was done by humans, by hand, with paint brushes and pollen. It turned out that the humans were actually better at it than the insects, because they were more consistent. So the result was a crop that was larger than it would have been had insects done the pollinating.

It's kind of a "waste" of human effort to do manual pollination like that rather than having insects do it "for free", but in an emergency, if that's all you've got, then it can be done.

It also seems to me like this kind of work would be ripe for automation with robots or drones somewhere down the line if, say, most bees wound up dying out and humans were forced to pollinate by hand at a large scale.

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Re:Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafro... by celias on Friday May 19, 2017 @05:09PM (#14379378)

podcast - http://www.radiolab.org/story/what-dollar-value-nature/

blog - http://www.radiolab.org/story/how-important-bee__kw/

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Re:Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafro... by drchickensalad on Friday May 26, 2017 @08:33AM (#14423573)

You should check out the latest black mirror episode.

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Re:Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafro... by maxerickson on Friday May 19, 2017 @03:51PM (#14378847)

It isn't so bad. Pollinating hundreds or thousands of flowers by hand in an hour is imaginable.

Better to have friendly insects do it, but if you want the fruits, having humans step in is viable (it is or at least has been done for apples in China).

There's also a lot of plants that self or wind pollinate (most grains).

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Re:Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafro... by ajmurmann on Friday May 19, 2017 @06:30PM (#14379815)

The vault against the story the media try to tell is not for mankind coming back from some apocalyptic event. It works like a bank vault. Anyone who wants can pay them money to keep sets safe. The common use case is for protecting seeds of crops your country cares about in case some pest kills all the crops or similar. Not for Mad Max.

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Re:Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafro... by nonbel on Saturday May 20, 2017 @02:09AM (#14381259)

Thanks, so then the first line is straight up fake news:

>"It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever."

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Re:Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafro... by Serubin on Saturday May 20, 2017 @02:38AM (#14381300)

I think it's safe to assume that while it's not the immediate intention, it certainly can act as such in a pinch.

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Re:Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafro... by nonbel on Saturday May 20, 2017 @09:01AM (#14382179)

This story makes it sounds like it can't because the vault was not built to last even 10 years.

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Re:Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafro... by ams6110 on Friday May 19, 2017 @04:42PM (#14379187)

Using drones to perform pollination would not be too difficult I wouldn't think...

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Re:Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafro... by pagnol on Friday May 19, 2017 @05:08PM (#14379373)

Actually, why live at all? If there are no humans, then there's no need for food, problem solved.

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Re:Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafro... by tzakrajs on Friday May 19, 2017 @06:04PM (#14379678)

Yeah! We don't need the baby or the bathwater!

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Re:Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafro... by IanDrake on Friday May 19, 2017 @04:21PM (#14379024)

Wait, I thought it was still 2017. 2020 already happened?

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