Scientists have rediscovered the 48,500 year old zombie virus, but it has been frozen until now.
As global temperatures rise, climate change is irreversibly defrosting major portions of the frozen Northern Hemisphere — a permanently frozen zone known as permafrost. While the main concern was the amount of greenhouse gases released as a result of this effect, the most recent concern is that these could also threaten to start releasing dangerous ancient organisms into the world, posing a significant risk to public health.
The oldest of the 13 primitive viruses discovered by these researchers was an amoeba virus that had been dormant for 48,500 years under a lake. The team determined that all 13 viruses still had the potential to become infectious pathogens using live single-cell amoeba cultures.
European scientists have studied ancient samples collected from permafrost in Russia’s Siberia region. Scientists have discovered 13 new viruses in addition to the zombie virus. And, because the zombie virus is a disease, any outbreak poses a significant risk to humans.
According to scientists, this 48,500-year-old virus known as Padoravirus Endome is the oldest. The researchers discovered a 30,000-year-old virus in 2013, but the zombie virus broke the record, according to scientists.
According to scientists, global warming and permafrost melting exacerbate climate change by releasing previously trapped greenhouse gases such as methane. However, its effect on dormant pathogens is unknown.
They cautioned that the biological risk of reviving the virus they studied was “absolutely negligible” due to the target species capable of infecting amoeba microbes, making the possibility of the virus infecting animals or humans so problematic that the risk could be extrapolated to show that the risk is real.
“It is possible that these unknown viruses were released after the melting of ancient permafrost,” they wrote in a preprint repository BioRxiv article that has not yet been peer-reviewed, according to the Bloomberg report.
Day by day, it appears that real-life science is catching up to science fiction, with researchers uncovering the latter of the aforementioned speculations. A team of researchers recently resurrected a slew of ancient viruses that had been frozen for tens of thousands of years in Siberian permafrost, and some are concerned that this could have disastrous consequences.
While most viruses discovered so far have only targeted amoeba, scientists believe that some may be lurking that could cause plant, animal, or human diseases. They had already noticed swaths of bacteria being released, but they pose a lesser threat now that we have antibiotics. However, if a novel virus, such as Sars-CoV-2, is accidentally released, it could be disastrous for public health.
Most of the viruses that will be released as permafrost ice thaws will be unknown to us because they have been frozen in time for eons. It remains to be seen whether they become infectious when exposed to current climate conditions, which may be vastly different from the time they were preserved.