Embedded deep in the permafrost of a remote island in the Svalbard archipelago, halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was built to withstand the test of time – including climate change – and the challenge of any natural or man-made disasters.
Opened in 2008, the seed vault contains nearly one million packets of seeds, all carefully labeled. The seeds come from almost every country in the world and are a vast sampling of unique varieties of major African and Asian food staples such as maize, rice, wheat, cowpea, and sorghum to European and South American varieties of lettuce, eggplant, squash, and potatoes.
Climate change has accelerated warming in the Arctic
The seed vault was built to be indestructible but in May of 2017, soaring Arctic temperatures, coming at the end of the world’s hottest year on record proved the scientists to be wrong. The extreme temperatures and rainfall started thawing the permafrost deep inside the mountain where the vault is located.
A 105-page report based on research published by the Norwegian Centre for Climate Services (NCCS) released this year, revealed that the islands that make up the Svalbard archipelago where the Seed Vault is located are experiencing rapid warming.
The report states that “from 1971 to 2017, a warming of 3-5 degrees Celsius has been observed … with the largest increase in winter and the smallest in summer.” The estimated average temperature for Svalbard is -8.7 degrees Celsius.”
“We know that the warming in this area has been very fast during the last five decades, seen in a global perspective,” said Inger Hanssen-Bauer of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, who was one of the editors of the study.
Svalbard’s glaciers are “losing more ice through melting and calving than they are accumulating through snowfall,” according to the report. “All of the well-observed glaciers are shrinking.” The warming of the surrounding ocean “has halted sea ice from forming.”
The 2,100 residents of the town of Longyearbyen, located near the seed vault, are also seeing the face of global warming. Buildings and homes built on permafrost that used to be hard as a rock are now in danger of becoming unlivable reports the Washington Post.
The thawing permafrost has made the ground unstable, causing great cracks to form in apartment blocks and structures to sink. “We can’t trust the permafrost anymore,” says Hege Njaa Aschim, communications manager for Statsbygg, the Norwegian government agency responsible for real estate, which owns 75 percent of the town’s buildings, reports CNN.
The outlook for the future
“It is rare that I use words like this, but what is happening in Svalbard is extreme,” said Ellen Hambro, director of the Norwegian Environment Agency, in a statement in February. “The temperature is rising faster here in the Arctic than anywhere else in the world, and climate change has already had major consequences for nature, animals and the community on the island group.”
The outlook is not good. Global warming is expected to increase temperatures in Longyearbyen by 7°C to 10°C, and rainfall by 40 to 65 percent, by the end of the century, depending on the level of global carbon emissions. The continued thawing of the permafrost is another worry.
“Permafrost holds an immense amount of carbon — enough to double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” says Frans-Jan Parmentier, an Arctic climate scientist who conducts research at a station just outside Longyearbyen.
Kim Holmen, of the Norwegian Polar Institute, says Longyearbyen’s story is more like a “forewarning” to the rest of the world. We must not assume that climate change “is not so serious,” he says. This has already been proven wrong. We are now seeing another picture of global warming, and it is stark.
“The brutality of nature used to bring joy, but now it scares people,” says Holmen.
