As global warming continues and glaciers and ice sheets melt, a new threat is surfacing from the permafrost. When land remains frozen for two or more years, it’s called permafrost, according to Newsweek. Some of the oldest permafrost, which is more than 650,000 years old, resides in Siberia. So how could this land, which has been frozen for years, be the cause of a new threat?
The answer is that it’s not the land itself that poses a threat, but rather what is trapped in the frozen land. As permafrost thaws, these threats will begin to be released, one of which is about 1,700 billion tons of carbon. But greenhouse gasses aren’t the only threat that permafrost brings. Microbes, which have been trapped in the frozen land, are also starting to thaw after millennia. And these microbes are believed to be able to survive extreme conditions. Both anthrax and pathogens, many of which we know to be extinct, could be hiding, frozen in the permafrost. Many of these pathogens could be dangerous and deadly, especially since we may not have treatments, medicines, or vaccines for them if they are to emerge.
A group of Russian and French researchers even went looking into viruses found under the permafrost in 2014. What they found was that a virus called pandoravirus had been dormant for 30,000 years as it remained frozen in permafrost in Siberia. They discovered that it solely infects amoeba, but more importantly, what they discovered proves that these frozen pathogens can survive in the permafrost. “If amoeba viruses can survive in these conditions, there is no reason for other viruses not to survive as well,” lead researcher Jean-Michel Claverie told Newsweek.
Although this area of Arctic permafrost isn’t near too many people, global warming could easily change that. “The public health risk is coming from the accelerated release of previously frozen viruses combined with increased human exposure since global warming is also making Arctic areas much more accessible to industrial development,” Claverie told Newsweek.
But the threat of these viruses gets worse. As temperatures warm, animals will begin to migrate north. This gives the viruses a way to infect hosts and move from species. Researchers at the University of Ottawa in Canada, whose work was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, looked into how the spillover to species could be a risk. “We used glacier runoff as a proxy for climate change, as it has been shown that a warming climate is going to increase glacier runoff at that specific lake (Canada’s Lake Hazen),” co-author Stéphane Aris-Brosou told Newsweek. “In our paper, we found that spillover risk increased with glacier runoff–or climate change–in lake sediment samples.”
This means the risk of viral spillover is greatly increased. Aris-Brosou told Newsweek that while their study isn’t going to predict another pandemic, it does show that as the Arctic melts, it could become a breeding ground for future viruses and pandemics. “It is one more line of evidence that we are modifying our planet in negative ways, and we need to reconsider the way we live,” Aris-Brosou told Newsweek.
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Written for Passport Health by Elle Johnson. Elle is a freelance journalist and social media content creator in Florida. Not only does she enjoy working as a freelancer, but in her free time she enjoys working on fictional stories.