The job of a seed vault is to store and protect the world’s precious genetic resources from existing and future threats.
In the absence of a crystal ball, planners behind the 1,700 such facilities globally have had to imagine what the future might have in store, whether it is the threat posed by terrorists or a changing climate.
Here’s how two of the world’s vaults, the Norwegian government’s facility in the permafrost of Svalbard, and the U.S. government’s vault at Fort Collins, Colorado have prepared for an unknown future.
Both are concerned about outside interventions, such as terrorist attacks, of course.
But their most pressing concerns are keeping those seeds safe from more mundane, but still very pressing, threats due to the surrounding environment.
The main worry for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is global warming, said Grethe-Helene Evjen, the vault’s project manager.
“The researchers say maybe in 100 years’ time there will be very little permafrost, if we can’t do anything with the climate change. This is the future,” Evjen said.
“Since the seed vault was established, Svalbard has experienced higher temperatures,” she said.
The vault at Svalbard is located deep inside a mountain near Longyearbyen, Norway. The town is on Spitzbergen, one of the islands that make up the Svalbard Archipelago which is situated about halfway between the northern coast of mainland Norway and the North Pole.
The site, which opened in 2008, was selected for its remoteness from other gene banks, while still having daily flights, according to Evjen. That geographic diversity is a form of risk management. The permafrost inside the mountain keeps the deposits of more than one million seed samples well frozen at minus 18 Celsius.
Should global warming effect a significant rise in sea levels, the Svalbard vault was perched high enough to remain dry, according to its website.
But those rising temperatures have meant even in this frigid climate steps had to be taken to mediate the risk from global warming. Some of the outer parts of the facilty thawed out, and some of the surrounding soil didn’t freeze, Evjen said.
A cooling system was recently installed to artificially freeze the ground and serve as a back-up to the keeping the vault frigid.