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.
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