SPITZBERGEN ISLAND, ARCTIC CIRCLE (AMP) — Fresh from her eyewitness inspection of Iceland’s glacier-covered Eyjafjallajökull volcano, the Vatican’s top linguist and environmental czar is now suggesting that illegal Russian mining of the Arctic may have triggered the eruption that has wreaked havoc all across Europe.
Sister Serena Serghetti leveled her charges during an official ceremony at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault near or “Doomsday Vault” near the North Pole, where she dposited a special box of rare African rice seeds while a choir of Norwegian schoolchildren followed her with candles singing “Slep Little Seedling.”
The Doomsday Vault opened in 2008 and houses more than two million seeds representing every variety of earth’s crops. In case an Armageddon-like nuclear war or a natural “extinction-level event” disaster occurs, the vault would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on the planet.
But “Mother Earth,” as the young and beautiful Serghetti has been dubbed, says the recent Icelandic eruption may have been a bit of both man-made and natural disaster, pointing to mining activities in the Arctic ever since the Russians caused an international furor in 2008 by diving two miles below the ice cap and planting the Russian flag on the seabed.
The Russian then claimed half the Arctic seabed for Mother Russia. The Russian divers, upon their return to Moscow, were personally greeted by Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and named Heroes of the Russian Federation.
The Arctic, like Antarctica, has been a flashpoint for territorial disputes over rich mineral deposits as well as fears of global warming. The latest research shows that the Arctic Circle may soon become ice-free, opening up new shipping routes, mining operations and global cataclysm: rising ocean levels could sink some of the world’s largest coastal cities in Atlantis-like tsunamis that displace hundreds of millions of inhabitants.
“The Norwegian island of Spitbergen was chosen as the location for this seed bault because it’s a remote region with low tectonic activity and artic environment that is ideal for preservation,” Serghetti noted to reporters bundled in parkas. “Now oil exploration poses a direct threat to this environment. It also accelerates global warming’s melting of the ice cap, threatening coastal cities around the world.”
Serghetti produced a geophone as proof of Russian mining. The small blue devices are used by oil companies to take seismic surveys of the earth’s subsurface in search of oil. Those surveys actually create thousands of tiny tremors deep beneath the seabed, a dangerous game that Serghetti suggests may have prompted the Iclandic eruption.
Reporters examining the device noted the manufacturer’s name: Midas Minerals & Mining LTD, a subsidiary of billionaire Sir Roman Midas’s mining and trading empire. Official at the company’s headquarters in London said Midas was sailing the Greek Islands on his new superyacht and was unavailable for comment.
