Is the threat real?
When the permanent ice dissolves and causes the pandemic to spread due to pathogens from ancient times, there is a low risk.
However, scientists say that humanity is not accurately assessing this possibility, CNN reported.
Chemical and radioactive waste from the Cold War, which can harm wildlife and disrupt ecosystems, can also be released during the ice melting process.
There are many worrying things happening with permanent ice and it really shows the importance of keeping as much permanent ice as possible, said Kimberley Miner, a climate scientist at the NASA Dynamic thrust laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.
The permanent ice layer covers 1/5 of the northern Hemisphere, consolidating the entire Arctic and northern forests of Alaska (US), Canada and Russia for several millennia.
The eternal ice layer is like a time cap file, preserving ancient viruses and the remains of some extinct animals.
Scientists have excavated and studied a number of animal remains in recent years, including two cave lions and one smooth- feathered corned teto.
Permanent fans are a good storage medium not only because of the cold but because it is an environment without oxygen that light cannot penetrate.
But the temperatures in the Arctic today are warming up four times faster than the rest of the planet, weakening the perennial ice layer above.
To understand the risks caused by the frozen virus, Jean-Michel Claverie - honorary professor of medicine and genetics at the University of Aix-Marseille School of Medicine in Marseille, France - has been testing soil samples taken from permafrost in Siberia to see which viral particles are still contagious.
He searched for what he called "zombie" viruses and found some of them.
virus hunter
Professor Claverie is researching a specific virus that he first discovered in 2003.
Known as giant viruses, they are much larger than regular viruses and can be observed under a regular light without an electronic kinh.
His efforts to detect the virus frozen in the ice layer were partly inspired by a group of Russian scientists.
Previously, in 2012, Russian scientists revived the wild sunflower from 30,000-year-old bean tissue found in the cave of a worm.
Since then, scientists have also succeeded in reviving extremely small animals from ancient times.
In 2014, he sought to revive a virus that he and his team had isolated from the permanent ice, allowing the virus to become infected for the first time in 30,000 years in the permanent ice by transferring the virus to the culture cells.
To ensure safety, he chose to study a virus that can only target single-celled amphibians, not animals or humans.
He repeated this achievement in 2015 when he isolated another virus that also targeted amphibians. And in the latest study published on February 18 this year in the journal Viruses, Professor Claverie and his colleagues separated several ancient virus strains from several eternal ice specimens taken from seven different locations across Siberia.
The latest revived strains represent five new virus families, in addition to the two virus families that he had revived before.
Of the 5 species, the oldest model is nearly 48,500 years old, taken from soil in a 16m deep underground lake. The youngest example, found in the stomach and skin of a 27,000-year-old male elephant with curly feathers.
Professor Claverie said that the amphi infection virus that is still infected after a long time is a sign of a larger underlying problem.
He was concerned that people would view his research as a scientific curiosity and not properly assess the serious threat to public health when the ancient virus comes back.
We consider these amphi infectious viruses as a replacement for all other feasible viruses that could survive in the last layer of ice, Claverie said.
We see traces of many other viruses, many other viruses, added a professor at the University of Aix-Marseille Medical School. So we know the virus is there. We do not know for sure whether those viruses are alive or not, but our argument is that if the amphi virus is still alive, there is no reason why other viruses are not alive and can infect the viral host."
