At this time of the year, people are complaining about the cold. However, it might be better if the weather were actually colder… and continued to get colder every year! Warnings about climate warming tell us how coastal cities could disappear under water, and how drier weather could affect food and water supplies. However, experts are now warning about another possible danger, coming not from the air but from our planet’s icy wastes!
MELTING ice
Climate change is melting permafrost around the world frozen for thousands of years. The Arctic permafrost alone covers an area double the size of the US. The temperature in the Arctic Circle is rising three times faster than the rest of the world, exposing older and older layers of permafrost.
Perfect for Viruses
Permafrost is perfect for preserving microbes and viruses. It is cold and dark, with no oxygen. Bacteria can live for very long periods of time, even millions of years. Diseases sleeping in the ice are now waking up. Nature, abused by man, and possibly looking for revenge, is opening a Pandora’s Box of zombie viruses. Permafrost could contain viruses, in frozen human bodies, that have caused global epidemics in the past. And some of those bodies go back to Neanderthal times, with viruses that we may never have seen before.
Anthrax Infection
In August 2016, in Siberia in the Arctic Circle, a twelve-year-old boy died, and twenty people ended up in hospital, after an anthrax infection. The anthrax came from a reindeer which had died seventy-five years before, and was then trapped in permafrost. In a heatwave, the reindeer was exposed, and the anthrax entered the soil and then the food chain. The danger is that this example may be repeated on a much greater scale.
‘Zombie’ Viruses
Experts are worried. Will our antibiotics be effective against these ‘zombie’ viruses from the past? In 2016, microbes from four million years ago were found in Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico three hundred metres underground. The bacteria was resistant to 70 per cent of antibiotics. From 1300 to 1870, the world experienced a ‘Little Ice Age’. The world may be in need of another mini-ice age. And the sooner the better.