'Doomsday vault' to resist global warming effects
Pastor Dale Morgan
'Doomsday vault' to resist global warming effects*
OSLO, Feb 9 (AFP) Feb 09, 2007
An Arctic "doomsday vault" aimed at providing mankind with food in case
of a global catastrophe will be designed to sustain the effects of
climate change, the project's builders said Friday as they unveiled the
architectural plans.
The top-security repository, carved into the permafrost of a mountain in
the remote Svalbard archipelago near the North Pole, will preserve some
three million batches of seeds from all known varieties of the planet's
crops.
The hope is that the vault will make it possible to re-establish crops
obliterated by major disasters.
"We have taken into consideration the (outside) temperature rising and
have located the facility so far inside the rock that it will be in
permafrost and won't be affected" by the outside temperature, Magnus
Bredeli Tveiten, project manager at Norway's Directorate of Public
Construction and Property, told AFP.
Construction on the seed bank, also dubbed the "Noah's Ark of food",
will begin in March.
The seed samples, such as wheat and potatoes, will be stored in two
chambers located deep inside a mountain, accessed by a 120-meter
(395-foot) tunnel. The tunnel and vaults will be excavated by boring and
blasting techniques and the rock walls sprayed with concrete.
The seeds will be maintained at a temperature of minus 18 degrees
Celsius (minus 0.4 Fahrenheit).
The vault is situated about 130 meters (426 feet) above current sea
level. It would not flood if Greenland's ice sheet melts, which some
estimate would increase sea levels by seven meters (23 feet).
It is also expected to be safe if the ices of Antarctica completely
melt, which experts say could increase sea levels by 61 meters (200 feet).
The entry to the vault, which will shoot out of the mountainside, will
be a narrow triangular portal made of cement and steel, illuminated with
artwork that changes according to the Arctic light.
In summer, "in the midnight sun, it will look like a large diamond,"
said Tveiten. In winter, when the sun does not rise above the horizon,
"it will glow into the darkness," he added.
Behind the airlock door, each chamber will measure 375 square meters
(4,036 square feet). Corrugated plastic boxes the size of moving boxes
will sit on rows of metal shelves.
Each box will contain about 400 samples in envelopes made of
polyethelene, and each sample will contain around 500 seeds.
The samples will be stored in watertight foil packages to act as a
barrier against moisture should a power failure disable refrigeration
systems.
Construction on the three-million-dollar (2.3-million-euro) vault is due
to finish in September. It will officially open in late winter 2008.
The design of the structure is "simple, it's functional, it runs by
itself. We can't have a better design," Cary Fowler, executive director
of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the brains behind the vault, told
AFP.
"It makes use of the natural cold. It's planned with the climate change
factor taken into consideration and it will be frozen 200 years from
now. And even in the worst case scenario, if the temperature rises it
will still be safe," he said.