Doomsday seed vault entrance repaired after thaw of Arctic ice | Reuters

By Alister Doyle | OSLO OSLO Norway is repairing the entrance of a "doomsday" seed vault on an Arctic island after an unexpected thaw of permafrost let water into a building meant as a deep freeze to safeguard the world's food supplies.The water, limited to the 15 metre (50 ft) entrance hall in the melt late last year, had no impact on millions of seeds of crops including rice, maize, potatoes and wheat that are stored more than 110 metres inside the mountainside.Still, water was an unexpected problem for the vault on the Svalbard archipelago, about 1,000 km (620 miles) from the North Pole. It seeks to safeguard seeds from cataclysms such as nuclear war or disease in natural permafrost."Svalbard Global Seed Vault is facing technical improvements in connection with water intrusion," Norwegian state construction group Statsbygg, which built the vault that opened in 2008, said in a statement on Saturday. "The seeds in the seed vault have never been threatened." Spokeswoman Hege Njaa Aschim said Statsbygg had removed electrical equipment from the entrance - a source of heat - and was building waterproof walls inside and ditches outside to channel away any water

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