Siberia, a land characterised by harsh winters and dangerous
wilderness, and hiding a secret for tens of thousands of years.
Climate change may reveal, in frozen patches of ground, deadly
and highly infectious microorganisms that have not seen the
light of day even before human civilization began 6000 years ago.
Periodic outbreaks of anthrax, the return of smallpox, the sneaking
revelation of a corpse infected with Spanish influenza, what’s next?
Another Covid-19 pandemic?
The Black Death?
Both!?
What do we do if an ancient pathogen
revives itself to wreak havoc on society?
How do we protect ourselves from “zombie” viruses,
hidden just beneath our feet, frozen in the very
soil that gets stuck in the treads of our shoes?
Let’s get into it!
While still up for debate amongst those who hate listening to
scientists, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s
modelling and international monitoring continues to find
that the ongoing release of greenhouse gases following the
industrial revolution is contributing to climate change.
To some of us, this might not be that surprising.
As of now, it’s widely accepted we will see an increase
of about 1.5 degrees Celsius in the 21st century, and that
has many implications for us, and the planet Earth itself.
One of the places where the effects of climate change
are felt most strongly, and earliest, is in the Arctic.
Current models show that the Arctic is warming twice
as fast as the rest of the World, and we can observe
the earliest effects of this in permafrost regions.
Permafrost, a potentially millions of years old frozen layer of soil,
has been thawing rapidly as the effects of climate change continue.
In Siberia particularly, where deep permafrost runs
beneath almost all of Russia’s Northeastern regions.
Another, more cataclysmic effect can also be seen in Siberia.
Large mounds of earth called Pingos that form when liquid water
freezes, and expands, pushing the earth upward into a mound.
Typically, when these mounds thaw, they collapse in on themselves,
but now due to the rapid increases in temperature, methane gas
builds up in these mounds until the pressure ruptures the mound,
and they explode in a flurry of flame and frozen rock and soil.
However, the main concern for author Jean-Marie Alempic and colleagues
in their 2022 study entitled “An Update on Eukaryotic Viruses Revived
From Ancient Permafrost” is not exploding mounds of methane, but
the consequences of thawing permafrost on life in these regions.
Little smaller than that.
There we go.
The researchers note that “the return of liquid water triggers
the metabolic reactivation of numerous soil microorganisms”.
Basically, as the ice thaws, dead microorganisms once preserved
in ice for god knows how many centuries, if not millenia, begin
to decompose, releasing more CO2 and Methane into the atmosphere.
The fear is that this will escalate the release of greenhouse gases into
the atmosphere, speeding up temperature increases in the Arctic, melting
the ice caps, until we’re in either a Waterworld or a Mad Max scenario.
I hope the latter!
However, Alempic insists that there is a darker,
more dangerous consequence of thawing permafrost.
Decomposition may worsen the effects of climate change,
but their main concern is not that these microorganisms
will die as they thaw, but that they’ll live…
The study suggests that thawing could signal the “physical
release of live bacteria—or archaea—that have remained
in cryptobiosis trapped in deep permafrost, isolated
from the Earth’s surface for up to 2 million years”.
In layman’s terms, frozen bacteria, viruses and other
microbiota can “revive” and rise again as zooooooombies.
As grim as it is, if that’s true, then frozen corpses are also a threat.
In a time when the world is still dominated by the threat of a
viral pandemic, the idea that any pathogen can survive the dead
of winter in the coldest regions of the World, lying in wait
inside the bodies of the dead in the ground is truly shivering.
Up until their study, only two “live” viruses had been found, and it
was thought that the viruses couldn’t survive the thawing process.
But Alempic and their colleagues disagreed, arguing that these
“zombie” viruses post a very serious public health threat.
With this in mind, they went out and sampled permafrost at
various depths to see what kinds of microcultures they could find.
But the question remains, what did they find down
there, and what kind of threat do they pose to us?
It sounds like a science fiction movie right?
The ancient disease, sealed away for
centuries, comes back to destroy the World.
Well, there’s good news.
Before you pack your bags and get into your
backyard bunkers to wait out the apocalypse, the
scientists behind this study did their due diligence.
Viruses are interesting creatures, insofar as they’re not
technically “creatures” but lines of biological code that
hijack real creatures so they can use them to reproduce.
Viruses burst the cell they’ve infected and “lyse”,
spitting out bunches of little viral babies.
Each species of virus adapts to infect
a specific host to reproduce inside of.
So a human virus can’t infect a dog, and vice versa.
Viruses can evolve to survive in different hosts, and
it does happen often enough, but scientifically, we
would consider them two different viruses at that point.
Knowing this, researchers used an amoeba called Acanthamoeba
castellanii as a “bait” to catch potential revived zombie viruses,
so the only viruses they found this time can infect amoebas.
So there’s no threat to people, animals, or crops.
Thanks science!
Researchers took various samples of permafrost
from 9 sites and placed them in petri dishes.
These include samples of permafrost from the bank
of a river, a woolly mammoth’s wool and stomach,
and the intestinal content of a Siberian wolf.
They then added A castellanii to the
dishes and watched to see if anything grew.
And oh boy did things grow.
The study found viruses that belonged to 5 different clades,
aka groups of species that share common ancestors: pandoravirus,
cedratvirus, megavirus, pacmanvirus, and pithovirus.
The majority of the viruses that researchers found belong
to the Pandoravirus family including about 14 new species.
Researchers found these viruses in permafrost along the Lena
river in Yakutsk, otherwise known as the coldest city on Earth.
Many of their samples contained Pandoraviruses but it was also found
in one of their oldest, a patch of permafrost dated back 48,000 years.
To put that in perspective, the Pyramids were built 6,500 years ago,
humans first came to North America across the Bering Strait 13,000
years ago, and Neanderthals went extinct only 40,000 years ago.
This tiny little virus is 8,000 years older than that!
This virus slept through the entirety of human civilization,
everything you know, everything everyone, everywhere
has ever known did not exist when this virus was first
“born” out of an infected amoeba in the land before time.
Pandoraviruses, named after the Greek myth of
Pandora’s box, is fortunately not dangerous for humans.
They are also, interestingly enough, the largest virus ever found.
Granted it’s still itsy bitsy teeny weenie, but I’ve done the
research and it’s absolutely not wearing a yellow polka dot bikini.
Make of that what you will.
Another group of viruses researchers discovered belongs to the
Pithovirus clade, including a new subfamily called Cedratviruses.
One was found in the same river researchers found the
Pandoraviruses in, another was from Kamchatka, and
they found another in frost along the Kolyma river.
They found one more species of Pithovirus in a 27,000 year old sample of
permafrost that contained a significant amount of woolly mammoth wool.
The authors of the study also note that the prototype Pithovirus
found in a previous study was dated to about 30,000 years ago.
The next virus they found is a species called Megavirus mammoth.
You wanna guess why?
Yup, because it was found in the same clump
of frozen 27,000 year old mammoth wool.
Finally we come to our personal
favourite virus, just for the name alone.
Pacmanviruses are one of the most recently discovered viruses that can
infect the giant amoebas the researchers used as bait in their study.
They’re a distant relative of African
swine fever virus, sharing 31 genes.
It was found inside of the frozen intestines of a
Siberian wolf in permafrost dated older than 27,000 years.
The name Pacmanvirus comes from an older study from 2017 whose authors
state that “We named it pacmanvirus because of the broken capsid that
we sometimes observed in our first transmission electron micrographs”.
Basically, they named it after Pac-man because it kinda looked like him.
Science is complicated, but sometimes Pac-man is just Pac-man.
Now as we learned earlier all of these viruses
aren’t dangerous to people, animals, or crops because
of how researchers used giant amoebas as bait.
However, the authors insist that the wide variety and number of
viruses they found that were able to “revive” themselves after
thousands of years of being frozen, suggests that there might be
many, many more unknown viruses under the permafrost that could
potentially threaten our food, our livestock, or our very lives.
They say that “one can reasonably infer that many other eukaryotic
viruses infecting a variety of hosts much beyond Acanthamoeba
species may also remain infectious in similar conditions.”
In the movie “The Thing”, Antarctic researchers uncover a
strange creature frozen in the ice, and are picked off one
by one after it thaws, revealing its shape shifting nature.
Now obviously, an amoeba infected by a virus is less spooky than
a shapeshifting nightmare from beyond the stars, but we would
like to know what’s down there before we accidentally dig it up.
It would have been a much shorter movie, if Kurt
Russel, after finding the alien, said “I read a paper
about this thing, we have to set it on fire, now.”
Jean-Michel Claverie, professor of Genomics and Bioinformatics
at the School of Medicine of Aix-Marseille University, for one
is concerned because, as he says "This is the first time we've
seen a virus that's still infectious after this length of time."
He reiterates the same feelings as other scientists,
emphasising that it’s “a recipe for disaster.
If you start having industrial explorations, people
will start to move around the deep permafrost layers.
Through mining and drilling, those old layers will be
penetrated and this is where the danger is coming from."
Claverie posits that "If it is true that these viruses survive in the
same way those amoeba viruses survive, then smallpox is not eradicated
from the planet — only the surface.” If this is true, he says, then
“smallpox could become again a disease of humans in modern times”.
And that would be a terrible nightmare scenario.
In the 20th century alone, smallpox took the lives of
over 300 million people and was one of the main diseases
that decimated indigenous North American populations
killing, by some measures, up to 90% of their population.
Alempic echoes this claim, citing another study from 2012 that
found smallpox in the preserved soft tissue of a 300 year old
Siberian mummy of a human buried and frozen in permafrost.
It’s not just smallpox though, but other viruses as well.
In 1999 scientists isolated influenza DNA from the biopsy
of a man who died from the Spanish flu back in 1918.
However it’s not just viruses that can survive
being cryogenically frozen, but bacteria as well.
Alempic notes that the periodic return of anthrax epidemics
that devastate reindeer populations has been connected to the
deep thawing of permafrost layers in hot summers across Earth.
Each time an epidemic spreads through their populations,
some die and are frozen for months to years.
Then, when a hot period arrives, they thaw, spread Bacillus
anthracis spores, and begin a whole new epidemic all over again.
Anthrax is a bacteria that causes lesions on the skin,
flu-like symptoms, fever, nausea among many other symptoms.
The most serious symptoms include sepsis triggered multiple
organ failure and hemorrhagic meningitis, aka inflammation
of the membranes and fluid covering the brain and spinal
cord which can trigger rampant internal bleeding and death.
Anthrax epidemics in Siberia have been recorded as early
as 1848, and the 20th century saw repeated outbreaks that
affected humans as much as it affected reindeer populations.
That said, the thing that frightens public health officials is the
more than 7000 anthrax tainted reindeer burial grounds scattered across
the region, threatening to thaw and lead to further loss of life.
In addition to that, digging into permafrost is, well,
beyond difficult, so many of these burial grounds are
relatively shallow, further increasing the risk of outbreak.
Even as recently as 2016, an outbreak in Siberia led to the deaths
of 2,350 reindeer after a particularly warm summer which indicated
to the authorities that thawing permafrost must have contributed.
The Russian government were forced to airlift families
out of the quarantined regions, and begin a massive
vaccination campaign inoculating as many wild reindeer
as possible, and burning any and all tainted corpses.
Unfortunately by the time all was said and done, dozens of
people were infected and a child had died of infection as well.
The reality of a changing planet is that we need
to prepare now for the problems of tomorrow.
Ignoring something because it has not yet
affected us personally, is no longer an option.
The world is more interconnected than ever before, and
obviously we all know how quickly disease can spread these days.
Whether it’s the return of smallpox as a disease that
afflicts people across the globe, the second rise of the
Spanish influenza, or outbreaks of anthrax, it’s clear
that thawing permafrost hides more than just frozen soil.
Alempic and their colleagues have shown us that it’s not
only possible, but in fact, likely that viruses can live
in a frozen state for tens of thousands of years, which
combined with the diseases that are already being released
from our frozen North, bids us a foul omen for the future.
But it’s not all skull and crossbones, doom and gloom, death and dying.
There are things we can do every day to
help climate scientists across the World.
Little things, like minding your water and power usage, choosing
to take the bus instead of driving, vacationing at home instead
of abroad, and most importantly, petitioning and demanding
lawmakers take action and hold polluting corporations accountable
for the health of our homes, and the world we all share.
Because if we don’t, soon the World will be perma-fudged.
Based on our recent video about a man who faked his death to save
his life, we put a poll on Twitter asking, "What would you do
if you overheard your friend's wife plotting to get him killed?"
It was all pretty close...
But what was really surprising is that so many of you would do nothing!
Luckily the guy who was actually in that situation didn't
just do something, he did all three things and came up
with an ingenious plan to bring the wife to justice.