Ummm…
The source that you seem to poo poo is Cary Fowler.
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Here’s the statement on their plans to mitigate the problem:
Given that Tolkien repeatedly has indicated that he and all English people are ‘Hobbits’ and his descriptions of how Bilbo’s relatives behaved once they thought the adventurer was dead and gone from Bag End, Tolkien fully expected this sort of shit to happen.
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“another fetch quest!?”
“well, the prince of new asia won’t give us the keys for unlocking the hydrodam which we need for powering the computer which we need for uncovering the identity of the smuggler who --”
“alright. alright. we’ll get the prince his damn acorn.”
“we just have to hope the seed bank isn’t flooded.”
“damn norwegians…”
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Well at least that is an easy fix. Lots of companies do waterproofing for foundations.
ETA
Avocados say “What’s the big deal?”
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When we need the seeds, we’ll be able to grow them on Svalbard.
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I am still waiting for Jason to publish the addendum that the vault is just fine, it’s only the entrance that is seeing water intrusion. The vault itself is still at -18°C, and is more or less a separate system. If anything, the air pocket traps and other safeguards against water flooding the entry have yet to be tested.
“Flooding is probably not quite the right word to use in this case,” says Cary Fowler, who helped create the seed vault. “In my experience, there’s been water intrusion at the front of the tunnel every single year.”
Source: Turns out the Svalbard seed vault is probably fine | Popular Science
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That doesn’t mean he would like it, though. Tolkien was an old style academic.
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I want to know about that cool window above the door.
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this? (looks like maybe not a window, but illuminated artwork?)
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That’s it. It looks other-worldly in the pictures. Like something out of the Marvel universe.
In other news, I was saddened to see that GM seeds are not being stored here.
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It’s cool, isn’t it? Looking at various images, the look changes a lot with time of day, and maybe time of year.
I’m curious about the plastic tote boxes holding all the seeds. Wondering, e.g., how stable the plastic is—e.g., does it off-gas? How well will it age—will it become brittle, or deteriorate in some way like so many household plastic items? There are umpty-million kinds of plastic…I imagine they chose carefully; it would be interesting to know how they chose.
I miss Maggie Koerth-Baker.
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QFT. She is great.
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I thought I saw her here in Minneapolis a few months ago, walking around by the Lakes (just a few blocks from her office address, as I later found out by looking at her website)—the person I saw sure looked like her picture, anyway. I wanted to say hello but I didn’t. I’m a nobody and she’s a somebody, and I thought it would be intrusive of me. But we’re both Minneapolitans, right? Later I kicked myself for not just stopping and asking Are you Maggie?—because if it was Maggie I could have told her that we think of her and miss her, and who wouldn’t like knowing that they are thought of and missed?
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It seems to my admittedly not an engineer mind that “Hey, did we plan what to do if the 500,000,000 tons of ice right around this thing turns to water or if things do warm up and it rains really hard, a lot, every year for decades?” would be really high on the list.
Or if the sun decides to ratchet itself up a couple of percentage points and the whole world turns into a tropical surprise, which I understand it does now and then, speaking really long term.
hmm, sounds like that will be going off-season pretty soon then.
She is at 538 now.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/contributors/maggie-koerth-baker
Recent posts by @maggiek include
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That’s part of its express purpose. GM seeds are also monoculture at its worst, and are quite vulnerable to mass extinction from a single cause; “potato famine”, anyone? A seed bank like this prevents the loss of diversity.
