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 ||||| The entrance to the international gene bank Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) is pictured outside Longyearbyen on Spitsbergen, Norway, February 29, 2016. REUTERS/Heiko Junge/NTB Scanpix 
 
 OSLO (Reuters) - Norway plans to spend 100 million Norwegian crowns ($13 million) to upgrade a doomsday seed vault on an Arctic island built 10 years ago to protect the world’s food supplies, the government said on Friday. 
 
 The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is meant as a natural deep freeze to back up the world’s gene banks in case of disasters ranging from nuclear war to global warming. It has about 900,000 seed samples. 
 
 The revamp would cover “construction of a new, concrete-built access tunnel, as well as a service building to house emergency power and refrigerating units and other electrical equipment that emits heat through the tunnel,” the Agriculture Ministry said in a statement. 
 
 An unexpected thaw of permafrost meant some water flowed into the entrance of the tunnel to the vault in late 2016. A decade ago, Norway said that it had cost $9 million to build the facility. 
 
 In 2015, researchers made a first withdrawal from the vault after Syria’s civil war damaged a seed bank near the Syrian city of Aleppo. The seeds were grown and re-deposited at the Svalbard vault last year. 
 
 “This demonstrates that the seed vault is a worldwide insurance for food supply for future generations,” Agriculture Minister Jon Georg Dale said in a statement. 
 
 ($1 = 7.8579 Norwegian crowns) ||||| Image copyright GCDT Image caption The vault's remote location in the Arctic Circle means there is very little need for human intervention 
 
 More than 20,000 crops from more than 100 nations have arrived at a "Doomsday vault" in the Arctic Circle. 
 
 The latest delivery coincides with the sixth anniversary of the frozen depository in Svalbard, which now houses more than 800,000 samples. 
 
 The shipment includes the first offering from Japan, where collections were threatened by the devastating earthquake and tsunami in 2011. 
 
 The facility is designed to withstand all natural and human disasters. 
 
 Deep inside a mountain on a remote island in the Svalbard archipelago - located halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole - the vault, which cost £5m (US $7m) and took 12 months to build, offers permanent protection for the world's food crops, say its operators. 
 
 The purpose of the depository, owned by the Norwegian government and maintained by the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT) and the Nordic Genetic Resources Center, is to store duplicates of all seed samples from crop collections around the world. 
 
 Image copyright GCDT 
 
 The GCDT says permafrost and thick rock ensure that, even in the case of a power cut, the seed samples will remain frozen. 
 
 "The vault can therefore be considered the ultimate insurance policy for the world's food supply," it adds. 
 
 "It will secure, for centuries, millions of seeds representing every important crop variety available in the world today." 
 
 The Japanese barley samples were provided by the Barley Germplasm Center at Okayama University. 
 
 Image copyright N.Palmer/CIAT Image caption National seed collections around the world have provided the samples being stored in the vault 
 
 Prof Kazuhiro Sato from the university's Institute of Plant Science and Resources said experts became concerned about the long-term safety of the national collection following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that caused widespread devastation. 
 
 "If something bad happened to our genebank, these resources could be damaged permanently," he said. 
 
 "Barley is very important not just for Japan but for the food security of the world - we have varieties that are productive even in dry conditions and in saline soil." 
 
 Speaking ahead of a meeting at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, GCDT executive director Marie Haga said: "Our annual gatherings at the seed vault are a sort of Winter Olympics of crop diversity, only we are not competing against each other but against the wide array of threats - natural and man-made - ranged against the diversity of food crops, diversity that is so crucial to the future of human civilisation." 
 
 She added: "We are particularly excited to be welcoming our first seed deposits from Japan, which has been very active globally in the preservation of a wide array of crop species."
– "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.)