2023-08-06 06:00:05
Science fiction often depicts deadly organisms emerging from the ice to strike terror among humans. But what about reality? Could it be that pathogens once common on Earth, frozen for millennia in glaciers, ice caps and permafrost, are reappearing with melting ice to disrupt modern ecosystems? In fact, this scenario is All completely believable. Image illustration Pixabay
Historical examples testify to this reality. In 2003, bacteria were resuscitated from samples taken from the bottom of a carrots of glace drilled in an ice sheet of the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau. The ice at this depth was over 750,000 years old. More recently, in 2016, an outbreak of anthrax in Western Siberia was attributed to rapid thawing of B. anthracis spores in permafrost. It killed thousands of reindeer and affected dozens of people.
With the rapid global warming of our planetit is estimated that four sextillion (4.1036) microorganisms could be released from melting ice each year. It is of the same order of magnitude as the name estimated stars in theobservable universe. However, despite this immeasurable number of microorganisms released by melting ice (including pathogens that could potentially infect modern species), no one has yet been able to estimate the risk this poses to modern ecosystems.
A new study published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology attempts to quantify these risks. The researchers used software called Avida to simulate the release of a type of pathogenic ancient in modern biological communities. The results of their simulations show that 1% of the simulated releases of a single pathogen dormant could cause major environmental damage and widespread loss of host organisms across the monde.
This study points to a potential new source of species extinction in the modern era, one that even our most pessimistic extinction models do not include. As a society, we need to understand potential risks so we can prepare for them.
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