According to a devastating report in The Guardian today, the Global Seed Vault–a repository of over 880,000 samples of the world’s seeds on the Norwegian island of Svalbard far north of the Arctic Circle–was flooded with meltwater less than a decade after it was built. The vault is designed to endure, frozen at -18C, forever, providing a kind of back-up copy of the world’s ecological diversity in the case of disaster. But after the hottest year on record that was 2016, Svalbard’s snow and permafrost melted, spilling water into the vault’s tunnel.
The Seed Vault opened in 2008, funded by the Norwegian government and managed by the nonprofit Crop Trust. It was designed to be “a fail-safe seed storage facility, built to stand the test of time–and the challenge of natural or man-made disasters.”
Embedded in the permafrost of the Arctic, it’s essentially meant to operate like a giant freezer that never requires power to cool–a beacon of self-sustaining resilient architecture. Whether it was nuclear attacks or earthquakes that threatened humanity and its biodiversity, the vault would live on as a repository of seeds that could be replanted by future generations. In 2015, the vault experienced its first withdrawal, far earlier than its managers expected, after the Syrian civil war destroyed seeds at a local repository.
Co.Design has reached out to the Crop Trust for more detail, and will update this post with more information when it becomes available.