Again! Norway to open a doomsday vault (...) World's information

[GRiM]

http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/norway-to-open-a-doomsday-vault-to-preserve-world-s-books/article/489365

By Kesavan Unnikrishnan yesterday in World
Second doomsday vault set up in an abandoned coal mine in Norwegian Arctic will store world's most precious books in digital form to protect them from the apocalypse.
This new vault, officially known as the World Arctic Archive, shares the same mountain as the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard. Alongside Norwegian government , representatives of Brazil's and Mexico's National Archives will be the first to save copies of their files deep inside the permafrost. READ MORE: Graphene-based electrode increases solar power storage The World Arctic Archive is run by Piql, a company based in the Norwegian city of Drammen with only 17 employees. Piql has developed a technology that allows old-fashioned photosensitive films to store larger amounts of data in multiple layers in analog form. The film is designed to withstand a lot of wear and tear. Piql’s Katrine Loen Thomsen says: "We believe that we can save the data using our technology for a whole 1,000 years. It's digital data preserved, written onto photosensitive film. So we write data as basically big QR codes on films." The entire archive will be located in Mine 3, a former coal mine which was abandoned more than two decades back. Conditions inside the mine are very stable and are not affected by the change of seasons. Owing to permafrost, the temperature inside the mines hovers always below zero degree Celsius. Svalbard is is also a very safe place for the archive to be kept, because it is effectively a demilitarized zone. The underground seed depository was opened in 2008 and acts as a master backup to the other seed banks around the world. Approximately 1.5 million distinct seed samples of agricultural crops are thought to exist in the vault.

 

[angelburst29]

I hope the engineer's for this World Arctic Archive were smart enough to figure in "water-proofing" in their drafting and construction, a minor detail that was over looked in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault construction? A multi-Million Dollar project and they failed on text book "basic construction 101"?

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the last-resort storage site for seeds designed to protect global plant biodiversity in the event of a planetary disaster or nuclear war, was almost flooded because of extremely high temperatures in the Arctic.

Global Doomsday Seed Vault Almost Flooded as Arctic Melts
https://sputniknews.com/world/201705201053801351-doomsday-seed-vault-flooded/

The Global Seed Vault was specifically designed with nuclear war in mind. It was even supposed to withstand a mythical nuclear winter — but it was nearly foundered by global warming.

The storage facility's entrance was swamped by melted and then refrozen permafrost (soil and water) after extremely high temperatures on Svalbard caused an unusual amount of heavy rain instead of light snow to fall.

"A lot of water went into the start of the tunnel and then it froze to ice, so it was like a glacier when you went in," said Hege Njaa Aschim, from the Norwegian government, which owns the vault.

Fortunately, the water froze before it could reach the vault itself and damage the seeds contained there. The ice was broken up and removed by the vault employees, but the breach has raised concerns over the storage's security.

"It was supposed to [operate] without the help of humans, but now we are watching the seed vault 24 hours a day," Aschim said. "We must see what we can do to minimize all the risks and make sure the seed bank can take care of itself."

According to Aschim, the breach happened because engineers never considered that the Arctic's layer permafrost, which is supposed to be, as the name suggests, permanent frost, would melt.

"It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that," Aschim said.

"The Arctic and especially Svalbard warms up faster than the rest of the world. The climate is changing dramatically and we are all amazed at how quickly it is going," says Ketil Isaksen of Norway's Meteorological Institute.

The vault crew is now performing maintenance work to waterproof the entire 100-meter-long tunnel into the mountain, with trenches are being dug to channel the rain and the melting permafrost away. Workers will also remove some electrical equipment that produces heat and will install pumps to take away the water in case other protections fail.

What concerns the scientists the most is whether the weather the vault recently experienced was an anomaly or if it is going to repeat in future years.

"We have to find solutions. It is a big responsibility and we take it very seriously. We are doing this for the world," Aschim said.