‘Doomsday’ seed vault meant to survive global disasters breached by climate change
The seed bank designed to preserve the world’s crops and plants in the event of global disaster isn’t prepared to withstand the greatest global disaster facing our planet: global warming. Melting permafrost on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, where the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is located, has seeped into the seed bank, raising questions of how the structure will be able to survive in the future as the Earth keeps warming.
The seed vault is built in an abandoned Arctic coal mine, deep inside a mountain. It contains about a million packets of seeds from almost every country in the world, representing “the most diverse collection of food crop seeds.” In 2015, the ongoing civil war in Syria prompted researchers in the Middle East to…
