Diseases That Have Been Trapped Under Ice Are Beginning To ¡®Wake Up¡¯, Thanks To Global Warming

Although humans have existed alongside bacteria and viruses since time immemorial, there have been viruses that have been absent for thousands of years now; some that we have grown to overcome, such as smallpox and others possibly that we may not even know about.

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As global warming melting the permafrost soils buried for thousands of years, however, ancient viruses and bacteria that have been lying dormant are being slowly released into our atmosphere, as they have been trapped under ice, reports the article published in the BBC.

Are there any incidents that brought this phenomenon to light?

In August 2016, a 12-year-old boy died and 20 others were hospitalised after being infected by anthrax in a remote corner of the Siberian Tundra called the Yamal Peninsula in the Arctic Circle.

In conjunction with this incident was the theory that over 75 years ago a carcass of a reindeer that died due to an anthrax infection got buried in a layer of frozen soil, which we refer to as permafrost.

A heatwave in 2016, however, melted the ice to a point that brought to surface the reindeer corpse, which then went on to infect the water and soil, and then infected the food supply. The virus infected more than 2,000 grazing reindeer and humans as well.

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The problem lies in the fact that global warming is heating the earth to such an extent that it has gradually begun to expose very old permafrost layers.

Normally the most superficial layers (up to 50cm deep) would melt every summer, but the rampant rate at which the earth is warming has started to expose us to diseases that have been buried for up to a million years.

"Permafrost is a very good preserver of microbes and viruses because it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark," says evolutionary biologist Jean-Michel Claverie at Aix-Marseille University in France, the BBC reported.

"Pathogenic viruses that can infect humans or animals might be preserved in old permafrost layers, including some that have caused global epidemics in the past."

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Since people and animals have been buried in permafrost for centuries, the possibility of other infections being released into the atmosphere is very likely.

The fact that scientists have discovered the 1918 Spanish flu virus buried intact in graves across Alaska¡¯s tundra or Smallpox and bubonic plague buried in Siberia are examples why the melting of permafrost can be catastrophic, the BBC added.

Researchers Boris Revich and Marina Podolnaya in their 2011 study on permafrost wrote: "As a consequence of permafrost melting, the vectors of deadly infections of the 18th and 19th Centuries may come back, especially near the cemeteries where the victims of these infections were buried."

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Bacteria can be tenacious and can survive thousands of years buried underground

In a 2005 study stated how NASA scientists were able to retrieve bacteria that had been buried in a frozen pond in Alaska for 32,00 years. Microbes that go by the name of Carnobacterium and pleistocenium were found to be swimming around unaffected even after the ice had melted. The bacteria were prevalent around the time when wooly mammoths still roamed the surface of the earth.

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A couple of years later scientists were able to retrieve an 8-million-year old bacterium that had been lying dormant under the surface of the glacier in the Beacon and Mullins valleys of Antarctica. The same study also revealed bacteria that had been buried for over 100,000 years.

Not all bacteria can back to life though after being frozen in permafrost. Bacteria like anthrax can only do so because they form hard spores that can survive for more than a century. Other bacteria like tetanus and Clostridium botulinum, certain fungi and viruses can also survive for long durations of time.

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How concerned should we be about this?

Since the risk from permafrost pathogens is inherently unknown, we should instead focus on threats that we can act on like climate change. Diseases such as malaria, cholera, and dengue fever will become more prevalent in the northern hemisphere as they get warmer due to global warming, suggests the BBC.

We cannot, however, ignore the risk being posed by these long-buried pathogenic microbes. Our immune systems may not be prepared for microbes that haven¡¯t been in contact with humans for a long time, and this could mean that the diseases they cause may not be curable by our current medications either.