>"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."<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm...</a> (Figure SPM.5)<p>[2] <a href="http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/wti" rel="nofollow">http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/wti</a>
"It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that,”<p>Sorry, but isn't that the entire point of a "doomsday vault". To protect from doomsday events, like extreme climate change?
"Fortunately, the meltwater did not reach the vault itself, the ice has been hacked out, and the precious seeds remain safe for now at the required storage temperature of -18C."
It would be interesting to learn what mistakes were made on a process level here.<p>Were warnings from people who predicted flooding ignored for some reason, like warning of concerned NASA engineers about the safety of the Space Shuttle? Or did no one honestly predict flooding in a region covered by snow despite global warming?<p>There could be some valuable lessons here for participants in Long Now and similar projects.
<i>The vault’s managers are now waiting to see if the extreme heat of this winter was a one-off or will be repeated or even exceeded as climate change heats the planet.</i><p>I really want to believe that this is an example of poor communication by the journalist as opposed to clueless passivity by administrators. Unfortunately, I suspect it's accurate.
>When it was opened in 2008, the deep permafrost through which the vault was sunk was expected to provide “failsafe” protection against “the challenge of natural or man-made disasters”.<p>Guess it wasn't all that fail safe after all
If you'd like to see more about how the Svalbard Seed Vault works and how countries including North Korea have seeds stored there, Veritasium has a great video on the subject: <a href="https://youtu.be/2_OEsf-1qgY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/2_OEsf-1qgY</a>
It looks like an engineering flaw that lets outside water into the vault. “A lot of water went into the start of the tunnel and then it froze to ice, so it was like a glacier when you went in,” The fact that the water froze as it entered is good as that means the vault was still very cold. Likely this has an engineering fix. It would be nice if the article discussed if the vault temp was rising faster than expected and if/when passive cooling would fail in the future. This should be the real worry about vault failure. Sophisticated click bait, really.