Hidden within Earth's ice lies some nasty surprises.
In 2016, news emerged of a mysterious disease that was tearing through
a community of nomadic herders in northern Siberia.
It killed over two and a half thousand reindeer,
with dozens of people hospitalised and many more evacuated.
The cause was anthrax, ancient anthrax,
because the outbreak had been triggered by spores of the disease that had somehow managed to survive for decades
in a deer carcass, buried deep within the permafrost.
Then, in 2021, in Tibet, scientists found even more ancient viruses,
buried within the ice in the Tibetan plateau.
They had somehow managed to survive for 15,000 years.
And these viruses were unlike anything scientists had seen before.
With the world's ice melting.
What else is waiting in there for us?
So I decided to find out whether this threat is real.
Worst case scenario would be that an old bacteria could show up again.
And the scale of the problem completely blew me away.
There is going to be so much misery.
There is going to be so much violence.
I think of those viruses and those bacteria like a machine gun.
Climate change can pull the trigger.
Before getting ahead of myself, I first wanted to find out how
and why anything can survive frozen in the ice for thousands of years
and then suddenly spring back to life.
So I started with a scientist who spent his life studying microbial life
in the glaciers in Greenland.
They have mechanisms that can make them freeze in without actually dying.
So they go into a dormant phase.
It's like a hibernation for microbes and keep going for,
sometimes in permafrost you can see microbes that they have been million years.
With the moment that they melt, they can very quickly switch on and then start to be very active.
If you freeze your microbes and from glaciers,
particularly, 50% of those microbes will start to be very active just after one hour.
A million years frozen in time, then suddenly back again.
It's a pretty scary thought.
But not all viruses and diseases affect humans.
And maybe the anthrax case was a one off.
Well to find out more,
I got in touch with infectious disease expert Birgitta Evengard,
who's been studying the topic for over 40 years and specialises in climate related risk.
Is there actually a chance that these diseases being released could be damaging to humans?
Without doubt.
Worst case scenario would be that an old bacteria that were around very many years ago could show up again.
And also that could be antibiotic resistant bacteria emerging from the permafrost
So, let me say, we don't know that much.
We don't know anything I would say.
We just know that we don't know enough.
Most of the areas we're talking about are very remote.
How would these viruses actually affect humans?
We have species on the move.
Humans don't move that much with climate change.
Not yet.
So the animals are moving towards the poles.
Of course, with animals bringing with them the biomes,
the bacteria they have in their stool,
or viruses they bring into virgin areas
So it's clear that there's a lot that's still unknown
and I think that's what makes it more terrifying.
Recent publications suggest that there could be up to 1.7 million unknown viruses in circulation right now,
capable of infecting humans.
So adding viruses from up to a million years ago into the equation is a pretty unsettling thought.
What did interest me, however, is that we do know that the melting ice
is causing animal movement and with that movement, viruses and disease.
So this made me think.
Are there other ways that climate change is spreading viruses?
So I scoured through the depths of the Internet and what I found shocked me.
This website takes all of the effects of climate change
and reveals how they are exacerbating the spread of viruses and disease.
And it's not just one or two.
There's loads.
So needless to say, I had to find out more.
So I spoke to one of the scientists who put this study together.
So we analysed all of the human diseases since the end of the Roman Empire until now
and we were looking at the extent to which any of those diseases
there is empirical data to suggest that climate change has had something to do with those diseases
And we found that 58% of all of the human diseases have been at some point aggravated by climatic changes
that are the consequence of greenhouse gases.
Over half of all diseases have been affected by climate change.
That's staggering.
And it's also something that Camilo knows all too well.
I found a paper making the connection between an outbreak of Chikungunya virus here in South America
In my country, it almost destroyed the economy.
People couldn't work.
Okay?
We're talking millions of people sick with this disease.
It turns out that this scientific paper made the connection between floods and the Chikungunya virus.
And it turns out that I was infected with the Chikungunya virus during that epidemic.
I remember myself wanting to die during that week.
My skin is full of blisters.
I wanted to pull off my skin, out of how much pain I was during that week.
This one outbreak was caused by massive floods that caused a spike on the mosquito populations.
That was a shocker, to say the least.
When I personally realised that I was already a victim of this issue of greenhouse gases.
If we don't change and this continues, how bad do you think it could get?
I think that what is going to happen is a lot of human misery.
There is going to be so much misery.
There is going to be so much violence.
It's going to be so freaking scary man.
I think of those viruses and those bacteria like a machine gun.
Climate change can pull the trigger on those viruses in 1000 different ways,
and you don't know what kind of machine gun is going to be shooting.
And I love it.
No offence, that many of these consequences are being felt in the developed world
For them to freaking realise that we are destroying the planet
You know?
Do you think it's too late to turn things around?
I don't think it's too late, man.
I refuse to think that it's too late.
You can imagine in 100 years time the history books,
looking at the misery that we left for them,
saying that it was us, the ones that we failed.
I just don't want to feel responsible for this thing.
I'm working my ass off to work on ways to fix this.
He's brilliant, isn't he?
So, not only may climate change release a whole new spree of deadly viruses
but it may also accelerate the spread.
Great.
Just as I thought it was all doom and gloom, Alex got back in touch
as he thought I might be interested in an era of his work
that might suggest that viruses being revealed on the ice,
might actually help to slow down the melting of the ice caps
by stopping algae.
So of course, I had to hear more.
There's so much life on the ice, more than you expect.
But one particular type of life is the growth of algae that grows on the ice.
And these algae are extremely dark and pigmented.
Because they are dark, they also end up melting the ice.
And the part of that growth is because of climate change.
I would say that it's about 10% more ice is melting just because
of the biological presence of the algae.
The equivalent of every year another 4 million Olympic sized swimming pools of water
coming out from Greenland, basically.
In a bewildering turn of events.
Alex's research suggests that viruses could actually be the key to slowing down this phenomenon
Just like they infect humans and then they are negative to humans,
they can be negative to the other organisms that they are infecting.
So they actually could potentially be a control of the biomass growth
of this dark pigmented algae.
From our perspective, this actually has a positive impact on a climate problematic organism.
So in layman's terms, viruses are actually helping to reduce the effects of climate change.
Potentially, in this particular situation, yes.
Well, that took a twist.
It's almost easy to personify these viruses as these evil organisms out to get us
But as you just heard, in some scenarios they're actually vital
in order to maintain the delicate balance of nature.
It's only when we intervene by warming up the planet,
that suddenly this balance gets tilted.
So not all viruses are bad, but we only have to look at COVID
to realise how quickly these things can spiral out of control.
And the worrying thing for me is neither Camilo, Birgitta or Alex
deny that things can get a lot worse.
So how do we stop it?
Well, it seems undeniable that if we want to stop the release of these viruses
and reduce the spread, we need to deal with climate change.
The thing that blows my mind
is that these things,
when people talk about climate change, they talk about let's do it in 2050.
What the hell!?
Basically when you say let's do it in 2050,
you are saying I'm not going to do it.
It's this freaking passing around the responsibility of things that they need to freaking do!
The thing that blows my mind is the fact that indeed we can do things right now
to deal with this thing heavily.
The technology is there, the manpower is there.
Fixing climate change is also going to require the awareness and the commitment
and the commitment of people like you and me and everyone in the community,
because we also keep expecting that our politicians,
the ones that are going to fix this and they have a lot to do
but they are not the only ones.