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.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

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
Former Digital Trends Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
The EU is cracking down on labels in Windows 11’s Start menu
The Surface Pro 11 on a white table in front of a window.

To align with the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), Microsoft is updating Windows 11's Start Menu Search, but only for users in the European Economic Area, as Tech Radar reports. The software giant is introducing more transparent labels to distinguish between web search results and local ones. This move is part of broader changes that let users uninstall Edge and turn off Bing integration, reinforcing transparency and user choice.

The changes are in a new Windows 11 Insider Preview Build, build 27764. Notably, X user @alex290292 shared a screenshot that shows the new Start menu user interface with the "Windows" and "Web search from Bing" sections. These changes are great news since they give users more control over Windows 11. Specifically, the modifications include adding custom web search providers to Windows Search, letting users remove the Edge browser, and turning off Bing web search.

Read more
Chrome incognito just got even more private with this change
The Chrome browser on the Nothing Phone 2a.

Google Chrome's Incognito mode and InPrivate just became even more private, as they no longer save copied text and media to the clipboard, according to Windows Latest. The changes apply to Windows 11 and 10 users and were rolled out in 2024. However, neither Microsoft nor Google documented it.

Even though this change is not a recent feature, it's odd that neither tech giant thought it was worth mentioning. Previously, the default setting was that when a user saved text or images to the clipboard history, it was synced with Cloud Clipboard on Windows. Moreover, accessing this synced content was as simple as pressing the Windows and V keys, which poses a security risk, especially when using incognito mode.

Read more
Google Messages might let you unsend awkward messages in RCS chats
The Google Messages app on the Galaxy S25 Ultra.

Google Messages, the default messaging app on Android phones, could soon get new features that will let you unsend texts like third-party messengers. The unsend functionality is reportedly under testing and will be available for chats over RCS protocol, which succeeds traditional SMS with improved support for multimedia, emoji, reactions, etc.

Presently, when you delete a message, it is only removed from your device without impacting other participants in the chat. Now, Google appears to be testing a new "delete for everyone" functionality for conversations that will delete messages for all parties, similar to instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. 9to5Google spotted references to the under-development functionality, suggesting it might be available for a wider audience to benefit from -- though the exact timeline of remains unknown.

Read more