![]() The vault is buried 1300 kilometres (over 800 miles) beyond the Arctic circle, and the thick permafrost was supposed to give it 'impregnable protection.' As the seed bank’s website says, "it was built underneath the permafrost so it could be a fail-safe seed storage facility, built to stand the test of time - and the challenge of natural or man-made disasters."īut global warming have caused rain as a result of which permafrost has been melting. It contains seed samples for foods like potatoes, sorghum, rice, barley, chickpeas, lentil, and wheat, whih are all stored at minus 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit. The vault is built in an abandoned Arctic coal mine, deep inside a mountain and the structure contains seeds from all over the world, making it “the most diverse collection of food crop seeds.” Thee Global Seed Vault, built to preserve food in the event of man-made catasrophe, has been flooded by melting ice or permafrost from the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. ![]() But it seems like global warming did not spare the wrath. Monday’s findings, which suggest the Thwaites is capable of receding at a much faster pace than recently thought, were documented on a 20-hour mission in extreme conditions that mapped an underwater area the size of Houston, according to a news release.The "doomsday" seed vault on the Arctic island of Svalbard was designed to preserve the world’s crops and plants in the event of global disaster. “It’s slowly spreading across the ice shelf and eventually it’s going to fracture into lots of different pieces.” “From the satellite data, we’re seeing these big fractures spreading across the ice shelf surface, essentially weakening the fabric of the ice kind of a bit like a windscreen crack,” Peter Davis, an oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey, told CNN in 2021. ![]() World's largest ice sheet crumbling faster than previously thought, satellite imagery showsĪnd then in 2021, a study showed the Thwaites Ice Shelf, which helps to stabilize the glacier and hold the ice back from flowing freely into the ocean, could shatter within five years. REUTERS/Alister Doyle/File Photo Alister Doyle/Reuters It was because of that research that scientists began calling the region around the Thwaites the “weak underbelly of the West Antarctic ice sheet.”Ī 20 metre-high ice cliff forming the edge of the Wilkins Ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula is seen from a plane January 18, 2009. ![]() Nearly a decade later, they found that – because the glacier is grounded to a seabed, rather than to dry land – warm ocean currents could melt the glacier from underneath, causing it to destabilize from below. As early as 1973, researchers questioned whether it was at high risk of collapse. The Thwaites Glacier itself has concerned scientists for decades. But it’s just a faction of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which holds enough ice to raise sea level by up to 16 feet, according to NASA.Īs the climate crisis has accelerated, this region has been closely monitored because of its rapid melting and its capacity for widespread coastal destruction. The Thwaites Glacier, located in West Antarctica, is one of the widest on Earth and is larger than the state of Florida. Palmer working near the Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf in in 2019. The US Antarctic Program research vessel Nathaniel B.
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