Reports spread over the weekend that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault had “flooded,” succumbing to the same force it was designed to protect the world’s food supply from: global warming.
The Seed Vault is an underground facility, opened in 2008, that houses more than 930,000 samples of seeds from around the world. It serves as a global backup for individual countries’ seed banks. To ensure natural refrigeration and allow independence from electricity and human upkeep, the vault is built deep in a mountain on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, inside the Arctic Circle.
On Friday, May 19, the Guardian and Wired ran stories claiming that melting permafrost had put the Global Seed Vault at risk. Their claims boiled down to the following:
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Melting permafrost had flooded the facility because of record-warm winter temperatures.
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Water in the entryway caught facility managers by surprise and endangered the seeds.
But these reports weren’t quite right. Popular Science then published a piece explaining that the reported worse-than-ever flooding was actually somewhat routine. According to the article:
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Water seeps into the entryway every year, according to Cary Fowler who spearheaded the vault’s creation.
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The front of the facility was designed to divert water runoff, and the seed storage is separated from the tunnel entrance by a long sloping tunnel with an uphill section before the vault doors. (See update and correction below.)
And on May 22, Popular Science updated its report by noting a clarification from the Norwegian organization called Crop Trust that cares for the physical installation and technical operation of the Seed Vault: The reported melting and flooding had actually occurred not recently, but during an unusually warm and rainy October of 2016.
Even more important was this, from Crop Trust’s statement: “The seeds and vault were never at risk.”
In subsequent statements, Crop Trust further clarified the safety of the seeds by assuring seed depositors that they’re taking extra measures to secure the vault and keeping an eye on the permafrost. “In order to be ‘better safe than sorry,'” their statement reads.
One reason the initial story caught on so quickly is that it plays into a key misconception about the Seed Vault: that it was designed and commissioned purely to combat the future effects of global warming.
In fact, the seeds in the Seed Vault preserve 881,473 different types of plants from 233 countries in order to backstop the loss or failure of local seed banks. In the fall of 2015, Wired reported that the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas, a seed bank near Aleppo, Syria, asked Svalbard to back its seed deposits so Syria could re-generate and redistribute its home supply. “The Svalbard system was created for moments just like this,” the report concluded.
While extreme weather events due to shifts in temperature can eradicate crops, protection against these events is far from the seed bank’s only purpose. Calling it a “doomsday vault,” and tying its significance to the projected effects of global warming, confuse the Seed Vault’s design intent.
Correction May 29, 2017: This post originally stated “The front of the facility was designed to divert water runoff, and the seed storage is uphill of the tunnel entrance.” David Wood, author of “Agrobiodiversity in Global Conservation Policy” emailed to clarify that in reality, the entry to the vault that stores the seeds is uphill from the bottom of a downward-sloping tunnel. Seed vault creator Carrie Fowler confirmed this in Popular Science.
If you have questions about this fact check, or would like to submit a request for another fact check, email Alice Lloyd at [email protected] or The Weekly Standard at [email protected].
