Climate change poses a multitude of threats to life on Earth, but new research has found a danger which was unheard of so far. According to European scientists, the thawing of ancient permafrost due to climate change can harm human beings. These researchers have unearthed almost two dozen viruses in Siberia. The most intriguing discovery is that of a virus frozen under a lake more than 48,500 years ago, Bloomberg reports.
What are zombie viruses?
As many as 13 new pathogens have been revived and characterised from permafrost in the Siberian region of Russia. Termed as "zombie viruses", the pathogens have been found to remain infectious despite spending many millennia trapped in the frozen ground.
Similar to greenhouse gas emissions worsening climate change, the thawing of permafrost due to atmospheric warming will have a devastating effect on ecosystems. However, the effect of climate change on dormant pathogens is less well understood, the report says.
Can these viruses infect humans?
The biological risk of reanimating the viruses studied was "totally negligible" due to the strains they targeted, according to the team of researchers from Russia, Germany and France. These viruses mainly infect amoeba microbes. The researchers said the potential revival of a virus that could infect animals or humans is much more problematic, and warned that their work can be extrapolated to show the danger is real.
In an article posted on the preprint repository bioRxiv, the researchers wrote that it is likely that the ancient permafrost will release these unknown viruses upon thawing. They also wrote that it is impossible to estimate how long these viruses could remain infectious once exposed to outdoor conditions, and how likely they will be to encounter and infect a suitable host in the interval.
The researchers stated that the risk is bound to increase in the context of global warming when permafrost thawing will keep accelerating, and more people will be populating the Arctic in the wake of industrial ventures.