Image - John Mcconmico / AP
On May 18th, The Guardian published a rather curious story: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has flooded due to ice melt caused by high temperatures . This vault stores nearly a million seeds of a wide variety of plants so that, in the event of their extinction, they can be recovered—a crucial factor in understanding the importance of biodiversity and the potential for catastrophe in our ecosystem.
Of course. When a place like that floods, it's normal to worry; after all, we might need those seeds someday. But the reality wasn't so dramatic.
One of the vault's creators spoke with Popular Science and explained that it hadn't actually flooded, but rather that water had entered through the tunnel—something that apparently happens regularly—and frozen . The tunnel, which is about 100 meters long, serves as a walkway into the mountain. Before reaching the vault's entrance, the terrain slopes upward, and it is precisely in this area where the water accumulates and is pumped out by two pumps.
“ The tunnel wasn’t designed to be waterproof at the front because we didn’t think it was necessary ,” he explained. Even so, if more water were to get in, it would freeze quickly, as the temperature is -18°C. But a site like this is supposed to be self-sustaining, so the Norwegian government plans to repair the leak to prevent it from happening again. For more details on weather-related phenomena, you can visit our article on atmospheric phenomena and the end of the world.
However, he said that, based on his studies, if all the ice melted and a very large tsunami occurred right in front of the vault, there would be no problem, since the vault would still be about five to seven stories above the event . To better understand the impact of these phenomena on the global climate, we can investigate them further.
