'Doomsday
Vault' To Resist
Global Warming Effects
By Penny MacRae
12 February, 2007
Agence France Presse
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 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.
Copyright © 2007 Agence France Presse
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