Melting millennial permafrost due to climate change could pose a new threat to humans, according to researchers. Nearly two dozen viruses have resurrected, including one frozen under the lake for more than 48,500 years.
European scientists studied millennial samples collected from permafrost in Russia’s Siberian region. Scientists have revived and identified 13 new pathogens they call “zombie viruses”, They discovered that they continued to be contagious despite spending thousands of years trapped under frozen ground, Bloomberg reported.
Scientists have long warned that thawing permafrost caused by global warming will exacerbate climate change by releasing previously trapped greenhouse gases such as methane. But its effect on occult pathogens is less well known.
The team of researchers from Russia, Germany and France, The biological risk of reintroducing the viruses they studied was “totally negligible” due to the targeted strainsthose that can infect mainly amoeba microbes.
Global warming could release frozen viruses
Potentially reactivating a virus that could infect animals or humans is far more problematic, officials said, warning that their work could be predicted to show that the danger is real.
“Then, millennial permafrost will likely release these unknown viruses as it thaws“, they wrote in an article published on the pre-release service bioRxiv who have not yet undergone peer review. “It is still impossible to predict how long these viruses will remain infectious when exposed to outdoor conditions, and how likely they are to find and infect a suitable host in the meantime.”
“But the risk will undoubtedly increase in the context of global warming “As permafrost thaws continue to accelerate and more people populate the Arctic as a result of industrial developments,” they wrote.
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