IS PERMAFROST THE NEW PANDEMIC ?

The frozen earth that covers much of the Arctic is home to growing microbial communities. For centuries, they had lain dormant, barely active or completely suspended, subsisting on minuscule pockets of water squeezed between the ice. With the Arctic warming at two to five times the global average, those pockets are becoming pools; rivulets, rivers; and puddles, ponds. The Arctic is waking up, and the microscopic organisms embedded in the land are coming back to life. “Over the past few years, there has been increasing evidence that the permafrost is a gigantic reservoir of ancient microbes or viruses that may come back to life if environmental conditions change and set them free again. There has been a separate study in which two viruses emerged from a single sample of 700-year-old caribou droppings. They were both able to be resurrected.
In 2014, scientists discovered a giant virus (a classification only discovered a decade earlier) frozen in a 30,000-year-old ice core. Like a scene out of a sci-fi movie, the scientists thawed it and watched it take over an amoeba. 

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