Skip to main content

Conservationists plan to build a giant doomsday vault for threatened coral reefs

 

Since it opened more than a decade ago, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen has served as an archive of the world’s plant seeds in the event of a global crisis. Now, North Queensland, Australia, is getting its own version — only this time, it’s about backing up the world’s coral supplies in a giant, ultrasecure above-ground bunker. And in this case, the crisis is already in progress.

Recommended Videos

“This project will allow us to keep safe 800 species of corals and avoid [their] extinction,” Rafael Contreras, director of Contreras Earl Architecture, the design firm working on the dedicated coral conservation center, told Digital Trends. “The corals are located in a special concrete vault that has been carefully designed in order to be able to face adverse weather conditions and the one-in-500-year flood levels. The primary goal of the building is to keep the corals safe no matter what future event — natural disaster or other — threatens the building. It has been designed to give the corals the best chance of survival.”

Coral vault
Contreras Earl Architecture

The Living Coral Biobank was commissioned by the nonprofit Great Barrier Reef Legacy, a foundation dedicated to preserving the world’s largest coral reef system. Threats to the Great Barrier Reef include rising water temperature, crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks, pollution-related poor water quality, and more. As a result of this imperfect storm of events, half of the Great Barrier Reef has been bleached to death since 2016.

This bleaching effect is due to the reef’s algae being killed off. The results are like an underwater version of the devastating forest fires that sweep parts of the world with increasing regularity. The Living Coral Biobank is an attempt to back up this coral biodiversity while we still have the chance to do so.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

While the most obvious comparison is with the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, this coral-focused biobank is different in more ways than just its content. It boasts a more aesthetically pleasing look, with slab-like concrete fins that, when viewed intheir entirety, gives the building a coral-like appearance. It will also feature various sustainability features, classrooms, exhibition space, and more — alongside the 73,500 square feet of coral archives. It will be located in a more built-up area in Port Douglas, North Queensland. Construction is set to be completed by 2025.

In the meantime, it looks like some of the other high-tech, coral-saving initiatives Digital Trends has covered before will have to do their best to pick up the slack.

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
This modular Pebble and Apple Watch underdog just smashed funding goals
UNA Watch

Both the Pebble Watch and Apple Watch are due some fierce competition as a new modular brand, UNA, is gaining some serous backing and excitement.

The UNA Watch is the creation of a Scottish company that wants to give everyone modular control of smartwatch upgrades and repairs.

Read more
Tesla, Warner Bros. dodge some claims in ‘Blade Runner 2049’ lawsuit, copyright battle continues
Tesla Cybercab at night

Tesla and Warner Bros. scored a partial legal victory as a federal judge dismissed several claims in a lawsuit filed by Alcon Entertainment, a production company behind the 2017 sci-fi movie Blade Runner 2049, Reuters reports.
The lawsuit accused the two companies of using imagery from the film to promote Tesla’s autonomous Cybercab vehicle at an event hosted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Studios in Hollywood in October of last year.
U.S. District Judge George Wu indicated he was inclined to dismiss Alcon’s allegations that Tesla and Warner Bros. violated trademark law, according to Reuters. Specifically, the judge said Musk only referenced the original Blade Runner movie at the event, and noted that Tesla and Alcon are not competitors.
"Tesla and Musk are looking to sell cars," Reuters quoted Wu as saying. "Plaintiff is plainly not in that line of business."
Wu also dismissed most of Alcon's claims against Warner Bros., the distributor of the Blade Runner franchise.
However, the judge allowed Alcon to continue its copyright infringement claims against Tesla for its alleged use of AI-generated images mimicking scenes from Blade Runner 2049 without permission.
Alcan says that just hours before the Cybercab event, it had turned down a request from Tesla and WBD to use “an icononic still image” from the movie.
In the lawsuit, Alcon explained its decision by saying that “any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.”
Alcon further said it did not want Blade Runner 2049 “to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.”
But according to Alcon, Tesla went ahead with feeding images from Blade Runner 2049 into an AI image generator to yield a still image that appeared on screen for 10 seconds during the Cybercab event. With the image featured in the background, Musk directly referenced Blade Runner.
Alcon also said that Musk’s reference to Blade Runner 2049 was not a coincidence as the movie features a “strikingly designed, artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car.”

Read more
Apple TV+ just got a price slash that’s tough to resist, and it won’t last long
The Apple TV main screen.

Apple has just quietly announced that it will be slashing the price on its Apple TV+ offering for a limited time deal.

While Apple prices the service at a standard $9.99 per month usually, it has just cut that way down to $2.99 per month.

Read more