Scientists Revive 48500-Year-Old ‘Zombie Virus’ Buried In Ice According to researchers who recovered nearly two dozen viruses, including one buried under a lake more than 48,500 years ago, the thawing of old permafrost due to climate change may represent a new threat to humanity.
European researchers studied ancient samples taken from permafrost in Russia’s Siberia region. They resurrected and classified 13 novel infections, dubbed “zombie viruses,” and discovered that they remained contagious despite spending millennia frozen in the earth.
Scientists have long warned that permafrost thawing caused by air warming will exacerbate climate change by releasing previously contained greenhouse gases such as methane. However, its impact on dormant pathogens is less clear.
The biological risk of reanimating the viruses investigated, according to the team of researchers from Russia, Germany, and France, was “absolutely insignificant” due to the strains they targeted, mostly those capable of infecting amoeba microorganisms. The possible resurgence of a virus that may infect animals or humans is significantly more serious, they warned, adding that their findings can be extrapolated to demonstrate the threat is real. Scientists Revive 48500-Year-Old ‘Zombie Virus’ Buried In Ice
“It is thus conceivable that ancient permafrost will release these unknown viruses upon thawing,” they wrote in an unpeer-reviewed piece submitted to the preprint portal bioRxiv. “It is impossible to predict how long these viruses will remain infectious once exposed to outdoor circumstances, and how likely they will be to contact and infect a compatible host during that time.”
“However, the risk is bound to increase in the context of global warming, as permafrost thawing accelerates and more people migrate to the Arctic as a result of industrial initiatives,” they stated.
