Permafrost or polar ice Greenland which is increasingly melting is called not only spilling water into the sea, but also virus-virus who had been imprisoned.
Recently, global warming caused the ice in Greenland to melt and drain 6 billion tons of water per day into the high seas. In addition to the impact on the environment, this melting ice has the potential to release viruses and microbes that were previously trapped in the ice.
After all, they haven’t died in the cold like Captain America did?
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In the film version, Captain America was forced to plunge a plane in the sea of ice in Greenland to prevent the massive explosion of a bomb in 1945. He was found frozen in the Arctic ice in 2011. Despite being trapped for 66 years in an iceberg, Steve Rogers was able to come back to life.
Professor of Geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and ice sheet expert Vladimir Romanovsky said the first thing to understand is that mysterious microbes freeze on land, not in the polar ice caps.
Meanwhile, the polar ice caps contain enormous greenhouse gases CO2 and methane. So, if the ice melts then this gas will come out and can cause uncontrollable climate change.
“Permafrost is already melting from top to bottom in many areas,” says Romanovsky.
According to him, although the underground ice sheet remains frozen throughout the year, most of the upper ice sheet has shifted due to melting.
“We observed that in the northernmost part of the Canadian Arctic, where the permafrost temperature is still around -14 degrees Celsius, it has melted from above. That means that part of the material that has been frozen for thousands of years is no longer frozen,” he was quoted as saying. Unearthed Greenpeace.
“That’s a recent development, only in the last 10 or 20 years.”
The rapidly increasing temperature in the region will gradually add to the active layer of permafrost. This ice sheet is called active because during the summer it is in the form of water, not ice.
Even so, permafrost doesn’t need to be completely thawed in order to free microorganisms that freeze on land from the ice prison.
An active layer that gets bigger and stays active longer becomes a new habitat when an increase in the amount of unfrozen water is sufficient to activate some biological processes.
In fact, a microbe or virus awakened from a long slumber can take the opportunity to move toward the talik, the layer above the permafrost that rarely freezes.
Virologist from the University of Aix-Marseille Jean Michel Claverie and his wife, Chantal Abergel, say ancient viruses trapped in permafrost can survive and come back to life.
“The idea that bacteria can last very long I think is definitely accepted. The remaining debate is how long? Is it a million years? 500 thousand years? Is it 50 thousand years?” Claverie said.
Claverie and his wife then used viral DNA taken from the ice sheet around the Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia and infected the amoeba to see if the virus was still functioning as intended.
“This is a proof of principle that we run in the lab. We can revive the virus from ancient permafrost samples. So far we haven’t been able to get to 30,000 years, but maybe it will come at some point,” Abergel said.
However, much remains unknown about viruses and microbes trapped in extreme environments such as polar ice caps.
Reporting from Forbes, in the worst case scenario, melting ice can release dangerous diseases into the surrounding environment.
The reason is, researchers have found intact smallpox and the Spanish flu virus in 100-year-old frozen tissue samples. Then an anthrax outbreak in Siberia five years ago is also believed to be the result of a pathogen preserved in deer carcasses.
(lom/arh)
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