WorldWide Drilling Resource

Opening the Doomsday Vault Compiled by Amy White, Associate Editor WorldWide Drilling Resource ® On the remote Arctic island archipelago of Svalbard, between the North Pole and Norway, more than 850,000 seeds sit neatly lined and stacked on shelves inside a vault. They comprise the ultimate backup of backups for the world’s seed stock in case of apocalypse by nuclear war, asteroid strike, or catastrophic disease. The media has coined it the “Doomsday Vault”, and it would not exist without drilling. The Global Seed Vault is located entirely within drill-and- blast excavated rock in the side of a mountain. A concrete portal is the only visible feature from aboveground. Building the facility involved drilling a 390-foot tunnel into permafrost, along with construction of three massive concrete storage vaults with ca- pacity to hold up to 3.5 million seeds. More than 1700 seed banks exist through-out the world, but many of them are vulnerable to natural disasters, war, and even more mundane hazards like a bro- ken freezer. The Svalbard vault, however, is protected by its remote location in per- mafrost 426 feet above sea level. It was designed to last a virtually infinite lifetime. Tunneling for the vault began with an initial blast on May 18, 2007. Over the next two months, blasting continued 24 hours a day until the final blast on July 9, 2007. Excavating the rock cavern required continuous monitoring, as the quality of Svalbard’s bedrock subsurface is particu- larly challenging with alternating layers of sandstone and claystone. Once the project started, it became clear the structure needed to be lowered in relation to the original plan so the entire rock cavern could be posi- tioned below a stable sandstone layer. The entrance was placed approximately 5 feet lower than the initial design, and the access tunnel was given an incline of roughly 1:12 to the opening of the rock tunnel. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault offi- cially opened in February 2008, and for the last seven years international scientists have been stocking it with seeds we rely on for food. It is the most protected seed bank on the planet. Due to the civil war in Syria, seeds are beingwithdrawn from the vault for the first time. Who knew it would be called upon so soon? From the entrance, a tube of corrugated steel pipe (called “Svalbard pipe”) tunnels into the mountain. Photos by Matthias Heyde, courtesy of regjeringen.no Portal to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault The world’s seeds are packed in sealed bags inside sealed crates, and stacked on tall shelves inside the vault. Seeds arrive under the “black box” regime, which means they can only be retrieved by the institutions who deposited them. " ; # 511-,(2 0) 20'5&43 %9 4+(3( ,/( $/5)$&452(23 ; 08 029'0/ # ! : : $8 $,- 3$-(3 *,6(/3,/4(2/$4,0/$- &0. "(% ,4( 777 *,6(/3,/4(2/$4,0/$- &0. 29 WorldWide Drilling Resource ® NOVEMBER 2015