text: Global Crop Diversity Trust via Flickr 
   
   Update 5/22: Recently, media reports emerged of water leaking into the entryway of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a facility that stores backup seeds for other seed banks all over the world. The facility is designed to be a backup for the backups. In an e-mail to Popular Science, Hege Njaa Aschim—communications director of the Norwegian Government-led organization Statsbygg, confirmed that the leaks happened last fall, during a time of high temperatures and unusual rainfall in the Svalbard area. “This fall—October 2016—we had extreme weather in Svalbard with high temperatures and a lot of rain—very unusual. This caused water intrusion into the tunnel leading to the seed vault. The seeds and the vault was never at risk. This was no flooding, but more water than we like. So we are doing measures to improve and secure the entrance and tunnel,” Aschim said. Aschim added that this year, no water has leaked into the entryway. In October, the water made it about 15 meters into the 100 meter tunnel and then stopped, freezing solid. The volume of the water that leaked in is unknown. Even before the events of October 2016, Statsbygg had already planned to take measures to waterproof the tunnel, which had an established tendency to let water in during the spring melt. While the tunnel is overlain by soil and permafrost, subject to the vagaries of weather and climate changes, the seeds themselves are stored in a vault built into the rock of the mountain—about 110 meters from the entrance to the tunnel. Initially, the people working on the project thought that the permafrost near the tunnel entrance would re-form (or re-freeze) after construction of the tunnel disturbed the layer of frozen Earth. It did not. Our original post from Friday continues below. 
   
   A failure at a fail-safe vault. The irony is delicious, but that’s not the whole story. On its website, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is described by Crop Trust—the nonprofit that runs it—as “a fail-safe seed storage facility, built to stand the test of time—and the challenge of natural or man-made disasters.” It holds backups of seeds from seed banks around the world, with the goal of preserving a legacy of crop diversity in the face of changing climate, natural disasters, and human conflicts. It’s operated for a little over nine years. Then, on Friday, news spread that water from melting permafrost had gushed into the tunnel and frozen, making the floor slick with ice but not impacting the seeds. It would seem the fail-safe had failed. Or had it? “Flooding is probably not quite the right word to use in this case,” says Cary Fowler, who helped create the seed vault. “In my experience, there’s been water intrusion at the front of the tunnel every single year.” Fowler wasn't at the seed vault this year when the flooding (or 'flooding') in question took place, but has extensive knowledge of the project and facilities. He explains that a 100 meter long tunnel leads into the heart of the mountain where the seed vault is stored, running at a slight downward slope. At the base of the slope are two pumping stations to remove any water that might get in. Then there's a slight uphill section before you reach the doors to the vault itself, where the seeds are kept at 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit or -18 Celsius. “The tunnel was never meant to be water tight at the front, because we didn’t think we would need that,” Fowler says. “What happens is, in the summer the permafrost melts, and some water comes in, and when it comes in, it freezes. It doesn’t typically go very far.” Permafrost is a frozen layer of Earth that's meant to be permanent, but it can be damaged if temperatures rise, or if humans dig into it and create more ways for heat to enter. In this case, the area has been going through a record heatwave, and the construction of the tunnel nine years ago dug into the permafrost and made it more vulnerable. The combination means that near the entrance to the tunnel—where the overlying soil is thinner—meltwater can indeed make its way through. That’s why the designers installed the pumps in the first place. 
   
   The Svalbard Global Seed Vault Global Crop Diversity Trust via Flickr ||||| OSLO (Reuters) - Syria’s civil war has prompted the first withdrawal of seeds from a “doomsday” vault built in an Arctic mountainside to safeguard global food supplies, officials said on Monday. 
   
   Television crews stand outside the Global Seed Vault before the opening ceremony in Longyearbyen February 26, 2008. REUTERS/Bob Strong 
   
   The seeds, including samples of wheat, barley and grasses suited to dry regions, have been requested by researchers elsewhere in the Middle East to replace seeds in a gene bank near the Syrian city of Aleppo that has been damaged by the war. 
   
   “Protecting the world’s biodiversity in this manner is precisely the purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault,” said Brian Lainoff, a spokesman for the Crop Trust, which runs the underground storage on a Norwegian island 1,300 km (800 miles) from the North Pole. 
   
   The vault, which opened on the Svalbard archipelago in 2008, is designed to protect crop seeds - such as beans, rice and wheat - against the worst cataclysms of nuclear war or disease. 
   
   It has more than 860,000 samples, from almost all nations. Even if the power were to fail, the vault would stay frozen and sealed for at least 200 years. 
   
   The Aleppo seed bank has kept partly functioning, including a cold storage, despite the conflict. But it was no longer able to maintain its role as a hub to grow seeds and distribute them to other nations, mainly in the Middle East. 
   
   Grethe Evjen, an expert at the Norwegian Agriculture Ministry, said the seeds had been requested by the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA). ICARDA moved its headquarters to Beirut from Aleppo in 2012 because of the war. 
   
   ICARDA wants almost 130 boxes out of 325 it had deposited in the vault, containing a total of 116,000 samples, she told Reuters. They will be sent once paperwork is completed, she said. 
   
   It would be the first withdrawal from the vault, she said. Many seeds from the Aleppo collection have traits resistant to drought, which could help breed crops to withstand climate change in dry areas from Australia to Africa. 
   
   Syria’s four-year civil war has killed an estimated 250,000 people and driven more than 11 million from their homes, with 7.6 million displaced within Syria.
target: – "This is supposed to last for eternity," says the operator of the so-called Doomsday Vault, which since 2008 has been tucked within a mountain on a Norwegian island 800 miles from the North Pole where the soil is always frozen—or is supposed to be. The Guardian reports the Global Seed Vault "has been breached," with meltwater pouring into its entrance. This though Reuters in 2015 reported that the location on the island of Spitsbergen was supposed to be so cold that in the event of power failure the nearly 1 million packets of crop seeds within the vault would be preserved for at least 200 years. The issue now is skyrocketing temperatures (roughly 45 degrees above normal in late 2016) that replaced light snow with rain and melting, and their effect on the permafrost that surrounds the vault. "It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there," explains Norwegian government rep Hege Njaa Aschim. Also not in the plans: watching the vault 24/7, as they are doing now. But now all the reasons not to panic: That water didn't make it to the vault, and new waterproofing work is underway. One of the vault's creators (who wasn't present during the incident) tells Popular Science "in my experience, there’s been water intrusion at the front of the tunnel every single year." He explains the protective mechanics of the path to the seeds: a 330-foot tunnel, two pumping stations, and a brief uphill slant before the vault, whose 0.4-degree Fahrenheit temperature would freeze any water that made it that far. (The vault saw its first withdrawal in 2015.)