[nonbel]

>"It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel."

This story makes the design/management of that place look really bad. In 2007 the IPCC was predicting a 0.4 C average temperature rise by 2020 and about 1.0 C by 2040[1], etc. This isn't too far off from what happened[2], so this makes it look like they did not plan ahead at all.

[1] http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm... (Figure SPM.5)

[2] http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/wti

[erentz]

Time for a backup vault on the other side of the arctic in Ellesmere Island. This time maybe they can tunnel an upward slope into a stable mountain so no moisture will be able to flow in, and moisture originating inside should (in theory) flow out.

[ajmurmann]

Or fly them to the moon!

[SAI_Peregrinus]

That and saving the seeds of flowering plants without preserving eggs of pollinating insects isn't very useful.

[pmoriarty]

I remember hearing I think it was a Radiolab episode which talked of an instance where a lot pollination was done by humans, by hand, with paint brushes and pollen. It turned out that the humans were actually better at it than the insects, because they were more consistent. So the result was a crop that was larger than it would have been had insects done the pollinating.

It's kind of a "waste" of human effort to do manual pollination like that rather than having insects do it "for free", but in an emergency, if that's all you've got, then it can be done.

It also seems to me like this kind of work would be ripe for automation with robots or drones somewhere down the line if, say, most bees wound up dying out and humans were forced to pollinate by hand at a large scale.

[celias]

podcast - http://www.radiolab.org/story/what-dollar-value-nature/

blog - http://www.radiolab.org/story/how-important-bee__kw/

[drchickensalad]

You should check out the latest black mirror episode.

[maxerickson]

It isn't so bad. Pollinating hundreds or thousands of flowers by hand in an hour is imaginable.

Better to have friendly insects do it, but if you want the fruits, having humans step in is viable (it is or at least has been done for apples in China).

There's also a lot of plants that self or wind pollinate (most grains).

[ajmurmann]

The vault against the story the media try to tell is not for mankind coming back from some apocalyptic event. It works like a bank vault. Anyone who wants can pay them money to keep sets safe. The common use case is for protecting seeds of crops your country cares about in case some pest kills all the crops or similar. Not for Mad Max.

[nonbel]

Thanks, so then the first line is straight up fake news:

>"It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever."

[Serubin]

I think it's safe to assume that while it's not the immediate intention, it certainly can act as such in a pinch.

[nonbel]

This story makes it sounds like it can't because the vault was not built to last even 10 years.

[ams6110]

Using drones to perform pollination would not be too difficult I wouldn't think...

[pagnol]

Actually, why live at all? If there are no humans, then there's no need for food, problem solved.

[tzakrajs]

Yeah! We don't need the baby or the bathwater!

[IanDrake]

Wait, I thought it was still 2017. 2020 already happened?