The Global Seed Vault up close
This wild place
we are visiting goes by multiple names and that can be confounding. The
archipelago was once named Spitzbergen, but now it's known as Svalbard
(apparently a treaty was involved). Only the largest island is called
Spitzbergen these days. The largest city on that island is called Longyearbyen,
and that is where we and our cold noses stood at the moment. I've shared a
video that gives you a glimpse of it all.
Longyearbyen is
the home to the Svalbard Global Seed Bank, created as a backup to ensure the
human race preserves the world's crop diversity. The idea is to provide
long-term storage of duplicate seeds from around the world in case of war,
disaster, plague or other forms of armageddon. If rebuilding is necessary, this
will provide a lot of what is needed to get us all up and running again.
There's not
much to see and no one is allowed in, unless you work there. Nevertheless, here
we were and I wanted to see it. Since a rifle was required to hike up to the
vault, we took a bus in the interest of not having me shooting everything but a
bear. We were lucky to find it open with a fresh supply of seeds from India and
Africa coming in. This almost never happens.
A TV team from
Spain thought this was big enough deal that it was covering it for the news or
a documentary. As we stood standing in the frigid air, I caught a few pictures
and videos of thousands of the husks being hauled into the vault's entrance,
which is nothing more than a slit of metal that burrows deep into the mountain
where the bank sits, far from any disasters that might taint or damage it.
Boating
Around Longyearbyen’s Harbor
Back at
sea-level we visited the North Pole Expedition Museum, dedicated to all things
Svalbard and loaded with fascinating bits of information about famous polar
expeditions. I learned for the first time that Roald Amundsen was not only the
first human to reach the South Pole but was the first to cross over the North
Pole, by dirigible! We felt a slight kinship with him since we had just covered
nearly 12,000 miles getting from Antarctica the previous February clear to the
opposite end of the planet, all without ever traveling by jet, well, except for
this one last leg.
We ended the
day boarding a ship that would take us beyond Longyearbyen's harbor and then back.
It felt like evening, but it was really mid afternoon. The sun was already low
in the sky and descending fast.
As we skated
out of the channel, I could only describe the land around us as an awful
beauty, barren and forbidding, a place as stunning, and as alien as any on
Earth with gargantuan mountains that rose up all around.
With the sun
dying, we passed immense buildings that looked like ancient coal plants, tiny
against the immense mountains. This was Barentsburg, one of Spitzbergen's
remaining Russian coal towns with a population of about 400 Russian and
Ukranian workers, though the word now was most of the Ukranians had departed
once Russia invaded their nation. From our ship, the buildings looked
abandoned, on their last legs, and maybe they were.
Soon the
enormous mountains, 1000 to 2000 feet of rock as smooth and hard as anthracite
grew dark against the orange and pink of the setting sun, gouged by epochs of
ferocious winds, rain and snow.
Sam, our guide,
a big, bearded marine biologist from Minnesota who was celebrating his last day
on the job told us the hottest air temperature of the year is 50º F in these
parts, and so the sea ice is melting rapidly, and that's a problem because one
of the things that keep the earth's temperature in a reasonable range is
because bright snow and ice reflect sunlight away from the planet. This is
known as the albedo effect. As snow and ice melts the planet grows darker and
therefore absorbs more of the sun's heat, accelerating the loss of still more
ice and snow. Case in point, last summer was the first time there was no ice in
the Longyearbyen harbor. "The Arctic," Sam told us, "is the
energy system that drives every ocean current in the world." And if goes
south (so to speak), it won't be good. Meanwhile he pointed out that with the
warming of the north pole, polar bears were struggling. There were about 5000
in the planet's Northernmost regions. About 2500 lived around Franz Joseph
Island, the only land farther north than Svalbard, and on Svalbard itself a mere
675 were managing to hang on, for now.
After Sam
finished his presentations, I walked to the prow of the ship feeling
melancholy. I gazed a long time at the unearthly evening as it descended and
found my mind wandering toward the ways the world might be coming apart. Seed
vaults as insurance against disaster, the proof around us of climate growing
increasingly unhinged, too many people and too much war in Ukraine and the
Middle East, along with 39 other murderous conflicts by last count. I thought
about it.
It was hard to
shake the feeling that we might not survive ourselves, but I still remained
optimistic. Surely we would figure out that turning on ourselves and our own,
our only, planet was senseless and our disputes tiny. Though it might feel like
we were doing worse, all of the indicators were that we are, in fact, far less
violent and stupid than we have been in the past.
I looked at
what remained of the spectacular sun that had just slipped beyond the lip of
the planet's cap and took some solace knowing that the planet had survived far
worse than anything we could dish out and would do just fine. The bigger
question was, would we?
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