Ancient 15,000-Year-Old Viruses Found in Melting Tibetan Glaciers:
Ancient creatures are emerging from the cold storage of melting permafrost, almost like something out of a horror movie.
From incredibly preserved extinct megafauna like the woolly rhino, to the 40,000-year-old remains of a giant wolf, and bacteria over 750,000 years old.
Not all of these things are dead.
Centuries-old moss was able to spring back to life in the warmth of the laboratory. So too, incredibly, were tiny 42,000-year-old roundworms.
These fascinating glimpses of organisms from Earth's long distant past are revealing the history of ancient ecosystems, including details of the environments in which they existed.
But the melt has also created some concerns about ancient viruses coming back to haunt us.
"Melting will not only lead to the loss of those ancient, archived microbes and viruses, but also release them to the environments in the future," researchers explained in a study last year, led by first author and microbiologist Zhi-Ping Zhong from Ohio State University.
Thanks to metagenomics techniques and new methods for keeping their ice core samples sterilized, the researchers are able to get a better understanding of what exactly lies within the cold.
A version of this article was first published in July 2021.
Zhong, Zhi-Ping, Tian, Funing, Roux, Simon, et al. Glacier ice archives nearly 15,000-year-old microbes and phages [open], Microbiome (DOI: 10.1186/s40168-021-01106-w)
This study was published in Microbiome.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday October 28 2022, @12:19PM (1 child)
That puts a damper on my Tibetan glacier licking hobby...
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Friday October 28 2022, @01:53PM
Nah, go for it. Take it slow to build up resistance and then laugh like a maniac when the rest of the world perishes due to a lack of antibodies.
(Score: 2) by SomeRandomGeek on Friday October 28 2022, @04:04PM (3 children)
Science fiction and science alarmists love the idea of a thousand year old virus coming back and infecting us all. I'm very skeptical. If these microbes were well adapted back then, then they have surviving relatives that are thousands of generations better adapted still around today. If they weren't well adapted back then, they're not going to be suddenly better adapted now.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday October 28 2022, @04:27PM
That's true, but not quite convincing. Population densities are a lot different now than they were back then, to pick just one example, so something that wasn't very successful then might be quite successful now. (But I do put the odds at rather low.)
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Michael on Friday October 28 2022, @04:51PM (1 child)
Is that how evolution works though?
Not sure that it's the unidirectional journey towards "better" that your comment seems to assume.
Possibly our immune systems haven't bothered keeping whatever defences we had against some old pathogen.
(Score: 2) by SomeRandomGeek on Friday October 28 2022, @05:10PM
Sure, evolution is not unidirectional. Better adapted means better adapted to the circumstances of the moment, not just stronger, smarter, faster. But I thinks that actually works against paleo-microbes in two ways. First, they were presumably well adapted to the circumstances under which they were frozen. Circumstances that no longer exist. So they are likely to be poorly adapted to the circumstances of today. Like if they are adapted to use woolly mammoths or giant sloths as hosts. Second, the parasite vs. immune system struggle is an arms race. It really does tend to be a linear struggle, with both sides getting better over time. The vulnerabilities in our immune system tend to be to weapons we have never seen before, not to weapons that are long since obsolete.