MELTING PLANET COULD RELEASE DANGEROUS FROZEN VIRUSES

Climate change threatens to bring eradicated viruses back from the dead; Scientists revive a frozen 30,000-year-old giant Siberian virus

Arielle Duhaime-Ross, March 3, 2014 (The Verge)

“All it took was a single sample of frozen Siberian soil for an international collaboration of researchers to discover, and revive, a new type of [virus]…[D]espite being frozen for over 30,000 years…[thawing allowed Pithovirus sibericum] to infect a throng of unsuspecting single-cell organisms for the first time in thousands of years. And given that climate change is already causing the ground to thaw in regions such as the Arctic and parts of Alaska, scientists fear that this lab experiment could eventually take to the field, leading to the spontaneous revival of ancient and unknown viruses…[T]here could be a slew of ‘eradicated’ viruses — viruses such as smallpox, which caused its last infection in 1977, and the livestock disease rinderpest — laying dormant deep within the Earth's oldest frozen soil layers…” click here for more

click to enlarge

Tweet