A Vault containing seeds for virtually every edible plant

I get that climate change is a problem but this article reads like they blame it and man-made effects 100%. Shouldn't the vault be very well constructed against things like this, especially since it's supposed to stand for decades without human intervention?

I saw Cary Fowler speak last week. He's the guy that organized the Svalbard vault. He said the news reports on this were highly inaccurate and exaggerated. Their was a small amount of water in the opening area, but it got no where near the actual seeds. A fix is already in the works.

I see them less as agriculture starter kits and more as archives of genetic information. Perhaps a climatic catastrophe reaches a new equilibrium after 200 years. A bunch of plants have gone extinct or are so hard to find they might as well be extinct. Civilization suffers a near fatality, but recovers just enough to trek out to those seed vaults. The seeds might serve an important role in breeding projects. It's maybe not the highest utility contingency, but it mitigates risk of permanent loss of genetic information.

It's a backup disk for dna. Nit a backup plan for the apocalipse

You’ll be surprised since we’ve already have to make withdrawals from this vault.

That is a really simplistic way to think about this. Most of the crops that we grow today were perfected after millenia of selective breeding and cannot be found in the wild. So the only place you can find them are in human granaries and fields grown and maintained by humans. Without humans to harvest and cultivate these crops (fertilizers, tilling, irrigation) most of the crops would likely perish.

Although it sounds horrible, I can certainly imagine a scenario in which some kind of catastrophe would wipe out a large section of the human race, and perhaps most of our farmers/crop growers as well. A decade after this catastrophe if a post-apocalyptic human race gains some kind of political stability, it would be immensely useful to have this kind of vault to restart agriculture.

I guess it's unlikely that all edible plants get wiped out, but you might not know which plant is most likely to get wiped out until it happens.

> Are they stored differently

Differently... from what?

It depends. Some seeds last 32,000 years, apparently[0].

[0] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/02/120221-olde...

I saw Cary Fowler speak last week. He's the guy that organized the Svalbard vault. He said that the seeds are regularly tested. They are rotated when their germination rate goes below 85%.