But that computing power comes at a price - literally. By crunching numbers and performing calculations that would take eons for us humans to complete by ourselves, they help us do things that would otherwise be impossible, like predicting hurricane flight paths, simulating nuclear disasters, or modeling how experimental drugs might effect human cells. Supercomputers are an essential part of modern science. How drilling into million-year-old Antarctic ice could help fight climate changeĪs climate change warms the world, Norway's doomsday seed vault needs a major redesignĭoomsday seed vault receives its first seed withdrawal request from war-torn Syria
This demonstrates that the seed vault is a worldwide insurance for food supply for future generations.” The ICARDA International Research Center, previously operating out of Aleppo in Syria, returned seeds harvested after they had retrieved their seeds from Svalbard in 2015.
“For the first time seeds were redeposited at the seed vault on Svalbard. “In 2017 the important role of the seed vault was made evident,” Dale said. Last year, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault received seeds back from this withdrawal. The first seeds request came from the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) in 2015, to establish new collections compromised by the Syrian war. And it didn’t take long for the vault to answer that call. The hope is that the wide variety of seeds represented within the vault can be used to establish crops with the genetic flexibility and resiliency to grow in various environmental conditions. If (or when) environmental catastrophe strikes a given region, governments can attempt to reboot their agricultural industries by requesting seed samples from the three organizations managing the seed vault: the Norwegian government, Crop Trust, and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center. Millions of seed samples from more than 930,000 crops take refuge within the seed vault’s steel and concrete walls, some 800 miles south of the North Pole. It is a great and important task to safeguard all the genetic material that is crucial to global food security,” Jon Georg Dale, Norway’s Minister of Agriculture and Food, said in a statement. “The upgrades, which we hope to begin presently, will ensure that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault can continue to offer the world’s gene banks a secure storage space in the future. The proposed plan includes construction of a new concrete access tunnel and a service building to protect emergency power and refrigeration units.
#Propose doomsday vault upgrade
Now, the Norwegian government has proposed a plan to invest 100 million Norwegian Crowns (about $12.7 million) to upgrade the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. But climate change has proven to be predictably problematic and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault may be less fortified than once thought.
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