Scientists around the world are creating repositories for everything - from seeds to ice and mammalian milk - in pursuit of the ability to preserve the rapidly disappearing natural order.
Scientists around the world are creating repositories for everything - from seeds to ice and mammalian milk - in pursuit of the ability to preserve the rapidly disappearing natural order.
On an incredibly warm October evening last year, one of the ancillary workers witnessed the rush of water pouring into the World Seed Vault corridor, located about 400 feet (122 meters) deep inside a mountainside on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen near the North Pole. The rain came with a storm. Temperatures usually drop well below freezing during this time of the year; and since the water closed the power grid, the electric pumps on site were useless. This underground shelter houses more than 5,000 types of staple food crops, including hundreds of thousands of wheat and rice varieties. It was supposed to become an impenetrable modern version of Noah's ark for plants, a kind of life raft in the fight against climate change and disasters. Local firefighters helped pump water out of the tunnel untiluntil the temperature dropped and the water froze. Then the inhabitants of the village located at the foot of the mountain brought shovels and axes and broke the ice cover by hand.
Several Norwegian radio stations and newspapers reported the incident immediately, but the incident did not receive international publicity until May, when it became clear that President Trump was likely to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. Shortly thereafter, news from Svalbard reached all corners of the world, and the headlines were full of statements like “The Doomsday Vault could not withstand global warming.” No one cared that more than half a year had passed since the flood and that the seeds stored there That year set the third consecutive global temperature record and record low Arctic ice cover, vast areas of permafrost continued to melt, and scientists said about 60% of primate species were threatened with extinction. All these facts already seemed to be signs of an increasingly hopeless future for the planet, and then the press began to add fuel to the fire with tales of the futility of our attempts to preserve at least something of the abundance around us.
The Seed Vault is perhaps the best-known project in the worldwide campaign to create warehouses for rare and endangered species to ensure their safety. Fortunately, over the past decade, scientists, governments, and even private companies have become adept at creating these kinds of deposits in the environment. At the San Diego Zoo, for example, viable cell cultures, seminal fluid, eggs and embryos of about 1,000 species of animals and plants are stored cryogenically using liquid nitrogen. The huge freezer at the National Ice Laboratory in Lakewood, Colorado contains a total of about 62,000 feet (19,000 m) of ice cores drawn from the rapidly melting glaciers and polar caps of Antarctica, Greenland and North America. The Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington DC houses the world's largest collection of frozen milk from exotic animals, both large (killer whales) and small (endangered fruit bats), whose goal is to identify ways to feed the most vulnerable members of any species: cubs. An international project called "The Ark of Amphibians" deals with external conservation by relocating amphibians - the most vulnerable class of animals - to closed premises for their preservation and collection of semen. An international project called "The Ark of Amphibians" deals with external conservation by relocating amphibians - the most vulnerable class of animals - to closed premises for their preservation and collection of semen. An international project called "The Ark of Amphibians" deals with external conservation by relocating amphibians - the most vulnerable class of animals - to closed premises for their preservation and collection of semen.
It is inherent in man to collect everything that can disappear. During the Renaissance, there were so-called cabinets of rarities, where wealthy merchants and aristocrats exhibited personal collections of mastodon bones, fossils, stuffed animals and all kinds of dried and pickled creatures. Some anthropologists believe that their field of knowledge emerged along with the European nostalgia for the aborigines who were wiped out by the diseases and weapons they brought. This feeling led to their desire to collect items of folk life, fragments of dying languages, and sometimes even living beings. Zisis Kozlakidis, President of the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories, an organization serving on behalf of some 1,300 biobanks that contain a wide variety of specimens, including viruses and reproductive cells of clouded leopards, saidthat the world has gripped a gathering rush, comparing it to the global space race. "There is a feeling," he said, "and quite strong that we are losing biodiversity faster than we can comprehend it."
Scientists are increasingly coming to a common opinion that at the moment we live in the Anthropocene era, the era of human domination in global natural ecosystems. We are responsible for the extinction of species, and not some asteroid or volcanic eruption. The change goes far beyond the issue of species extinction: we have changed the composition of the atmosphere and the chemical environment of the oceans. For several decades, we have succeeded in distorting biological, chemical and physical reality that has remained unchanged for millennia. And now, in the face of these incomprehensible metamorphoses, we are desperately trying to preserve and preserve what little is left. Scientists have even begun to study the psychology of such a human reaction - one such book is called, for example, "Anthropology of Extinction: Essays on the Death of Culture and Species."In a sense, our ecological banks are the same cabinets of rarities, but in the Anthropocene era - a tribute to the fantastic splendor of the world at a particular geological moment, before it leaves without a return.
Dr. Thomas Paine in a seed vault in Mexico / AP Photo, Eduardo Verdugo
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We are building such banks in order to better understand, and, possibly, preserve our disappearing world. The plan is to research these samples and make sure they are safe for future scientists who will probably be more tech savvy than we are, and hopefully smarter. Geneticists already know how to clone animals; restore genetic diversity to endangered species through in vitro fertilization; rewrite genomes; and make synthetic DNA. Glaciologists recreate ancient climates and atmospheric phenomena (and predict future ones) by studying molecules trapped in ice. Rare coral species are cultivated by marine biologists in underwater reserves. Botanists recently sprouted a delicate plant with white flowers using genetic material from seeds,buried by squirrels in the permafrost of Siberia 32,000 years ago. What will we be capable of in 10,000 or even a hundred years?
But the world, as always, is changing - and today we are activating and accelerating the process in ways that we do not always have a full understanding of. After all, the banks themselves are subject to this change. Things can go wrong: power outages, backup generators, fires, floods, earthquakes, pollution, liquid nitrogen shortages, war, kidnapping, neglect. In early April, a malfunction of the freezer at the University of Alberta Cold Storage caused hundreds of ice samples to melt, turning frozen information about tens of thousands of years of the Earth's climate into puddles, which one of the glaciologists observing the sad consequences compared to those that form in the changing rooms of swimming pools. Data on the contents of these repositories - genomes, histories of the origin of species - can be stolen, damaged,lost or simply formatted to such a state that in the future they will no longer be decrypted. Such concerns cross the mind of Oliver Ryder, director of genetics at the Conservation Research Institute at the San Diego Zoo, and keep him awake at night. “I'm not just afraid that something bad is going to happen,” he told me. - Bad things will happen one way or another. This is the usual order of things."
Malia Wollan