Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts

[lintz]

[quote]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.

The vault is on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and contains almost a million packets of seeds, each a variety of an important food crop. 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”.

But soaring temperatures in the Arctic at the end of the world’s hottest ever recorded year led to melting and heavy rain, when light snow should have been falling. “It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that,” said Hege Njaa Aschim, from the Norwegian government, which owns the vault.[/quote]

but global warming is just a chinese scam amirite?

[URL="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/19/arctic-stronghold-of-worlds-seeds-flooded-after-permafrost-melts?CMP=share_btn_tw"]source[/URL]

[editline]20th May 2017[/editline]

nvm blackmagemari posted it first damn it

[elix]

It kills me that science was warning about this almost 30 years ago, but greed and laziness means we've ignored every warning and have likely doomed our descendants to several extra centuries of planetary instability.

Dear rich guys, money won't mean anything when there's no economy to spend it in. And that day is coming soon.