“t was like a glacier when you went in,” Aschim said. Water flooded into the entrance tunnel to the vault after the unusual season, the Guardian reported Friday (May 19).Thankfully, the water froze before it reached the seed storage areas (to preserve their viability, seeds are stored at -18 Celsius, or just below 0 degrees Fahrenheit). The only way it could fail is failing to hold interest, since bethesda is bulding it off the idea that people will play it forever, to quote. “It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that,” Hege Njaa Aschim, a spokeswoman for the Norwegian government agency which manages the vault, told the Guardian. It’s about as mainstream as a fallout game can get.
Scientists at the time were just beginning to understand what a threat global warming posed to the frozen layer. The people behind the seed vault’s perspective were not prepared for that when they built it in 2008. But thanks to climate change, the permafrost now is thawing, releasing greenhouse gases while causing the land to subside and pools of meltwater to form on the surface. When ice and snow melts in the Arctic during summer, permafrost-theoretically “permanent”-does not. AP Photo/John McConnico The Svalbard Global Seed Vaultīut as with much of the land above the Arctic circle, the mountain containing the vault-and all the land around it-is made of permafrost, the thick layer of compounded plants and animal bones that has been frozen since the last ice age.
