Dormant Diseases Frozen In the Ice Are Waking Up (bbc.co.uk)

boley1 writes: Like a plot from a Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) movie, evil is waking up as permafrost melts due to weather or natural, man-made, local, and/or global climate change. (Take your pick of any or all -- doesn't matter -- the plot and result is roughly the same.) According the the BBC, a 12-year-old boy died and at least twenty people were hospitalized after being infected by a disease (anthrax) that lay buried in the ice for 75 years. "The theory is that, over 75 years ago, a reindeer infected with anthrax died and its frozen carcass became trapped under a layer of frozen soil, known as permafrost," reports BBC. "There it stayed until a heatwave in the summer of 2016, when the permafrost thawed." In this case, bringing back the disease was accidental, but the story goes on to give examples of scientists (no indication of whether they are mad or not) purposefully seeing what ancient bacteria and virus they can resurrect from the ice. How many more diseases are lurking in the ice? Will The Andromeda Strain be released by meddling scientists or global warming?

Comments

More idiotic click-bait

[ScentCone]

Come ON, Slashdot.

Anthrax isn't a "dormant disease." There's live anthrax running around all over the place. It's not some ancient disease that's suddenly re-emerging because of global warming. What nonsense.

Re:More idiotic click-bait

[ShanghaiBill]

During WW1, German agents in American ports infected horses with anthrax to kill them before they arrived in France. It is not clear exactly how many horses died, but the number was roughly zero. It is not clear why their actions were so ineffective.

Re:Thinking Things Through

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's a clumsy attempt by some clueless editor to conflate two things.

The reindeer was frozen, now it's thawing, and anthrax was released. In addition, but not actually covered by this story, areas of permafrost are also thawing, and this may (conjecturally, but plausibly) also contain nasty bacteria or even viruses that have been frozen for thousands or even millions of years.

Yes, it's alarmism, yes it's got an agenda, but it's not as organised as you think. What you're seeing is the product of routine pressure put on the BBC editor to sex up mundane or obscure stories, without actually being given any resources (such as time) to research or improve the information content. The result is, the editor tries to add "context" from other stories that they kinda think they seem to remember seeing somewhere sometime. That's all it is.

Re:Um, right

[Anonymous Coward]

Anthrax spores survive at least 40 years under mild conditions at the soil, as the British discovered in their weapons testing island.

Forget movies

[JThundley]

This was the plot of the beautiful and great game The Talos Principle!

Re:Um, right

[Gryle]

It may sound far-fetched, but it's possible. Anthrax spores are ridiculously hardy under natural conditions and can survive in their dormant state for years. (Decontamination is done with either high heat (120 celcius) or some rather nasty chemicals.) Gruinard Island is the most famous example, but there are other cases of dormant anthrax spores "waking up" decades after the original victim, either animal or human, died from infection. Anthrax can also spread by inhalation, touch (if there's an open wound), or ingestion. Let's say one of the reindeer walked by the original corpse and inhaled some spores. Reindeer gets infected. Reindeer herders slaughter reindeer before it shows symptoms and eat the meat. Now they're infected.

Re:Thinking Things Through

[radarskiy]

Permafrost does not extend to the surface. For any particular environment with permafrost, there is 1) a depth at which the maximum temperature does not exceed freezing (permafrost table), 2) a depth where the temperature does not vary with the season, and 3) a depth where geothermal heat keeps the temperature above freezing (permafrost base). Permafrost is what is between the permafrost table and base.

As new soil is laid down, any covered objects such as an animal carcass are deeper and deeper and eventually reach the depth of the permafrost table where they become permanently frozen. However, if seasonal highs are increasing fast enough then the permafrost table can be lowering faster than new soil can be added so that objects previously below the table are now above it and start thawing.

So there is no agenda, you just didn't know what "permafrost" really meant.

Re:Um, right

[Xest]

Probably the first myth to dispel is that anthrax is some magical thing conjured up by governments for biological warfare. It's not, it's a naturally occurring bacteria, most common in warmer climates of Southern Europe and Africa, but also present in North America too. It's typically carried by animals, both through contact, and through ingestion (which in turn allows it to be transmitted from prey, to predator), and of the roughly couple of thousand natural cases of human infection that occur across the world every year, many are in people working in industries such as tanning - i.e. working with infected animal hides.

Part the reason this natural bacteria was chosen for weaponisation was precisely it's resilience, and it's ease of infection, coupled with it's relatively high fatality rate. It shouldn't be surprising therefore that an animal carcass frozen in ice could still infect someone given it's properties of resilience, infection, and the fact that animal carcasses are exactly where you would most likely encounter it in the first place.

Given this, I'm intrigued to know if you still think it's ridiculous, and if so, why?

Re:Thinking Things Through

[Kiuas]

Any time someone is proclaiming doom now I look for the agenda behind it - and sadly these days it is always there.

Any and all statements made have an agenda. What you just did is take a single anecdote about this story, namely that the permafrost layer is not constant (which no-one anywhere has ever claimed to begin with), and used that to arrive to the unfounded conclusion that there cannot possibly be a problem with the observed thawing of the permafrost layers across the arctic regions:

The study published in Nature Climate Change and led by Northern Arizona University assistant research professor, Christina Schädel, analysed 25 Arctic soil incubation studies and discovered that the majority of that carbon emitted was in the form of carbon dioxide even in the low oxygen conditions, with only five per cent of the total anaerobic products being methane.

This means that even though methane packs 34 times the climate warming punch of carbon dioxide, methane fluxes were not high enough to compensate for the smaller total quantity of carbon released under low oxygen conditions in wet soils.

Dr Hartley said: "In different boreal and arctic ecosystems, permafrost thaw can expose previously-frozen organic matter to very different soil conditions. The results of our study indicate that where the soils remain dry there is much greater potential for large amounts of carbon to be released to the atmosphere and for there to a positive feedback to climate change."

Scientists in the international Permafrost Carbon Network that Schädel co-leads with Northern Arizona University professor of ecosystem ecology, Ted Schuur, provided much of the data.

Dr Schädel said: "Our results show that increasing temperatures have a large effect on carbon release from permafrost but that changes in soil moisture conditions have an even greater effect," says Schädel. "We conclude that the permafrost carbon feedback will be stronger when a larger percentage of the permafrost zone undergoes thaw in a dry and oxygen-rich environment."

As the permafrost thaws, microbes wake up and begin digesting the newly available remains of ancient plants and animals stored as carbon in the soil. This digestion produces either carbon dioxide or methane, depending on soil conditions. Scientists want to understand the ratio of carbon dioxide to methane gas released by this process because it affects the strength of the permafrost carbon feedback loop: greenhouse gases released due to thawing permafrost cause temperatures to rise, leading to even more thawing and carbon release. Furthermore, the Arctic permafrost is like a vast underground storage tank of carbon, holding almost twice as much as the atmosphere. At that scale, small changes in how the carbon is released will have big effects.

Yeah, those infernal scientists with their nasty 'agenda' of trying to understand the ecosystem better so we can actually do something about the issue. Surely all the data must be irrelevant, after all it'd be unfathomable to think that permafrost can still form in some places whilst its total amount is going down, and this entire process could still have vast negative feedback-loop effects because its self-accelerating. Everyone knows after all that either it's warming universally everywhere making frozen reindeer impossible, or it's not warming at all! Checkmate.

I was convinced of this based on all the data and research, but your astute observation that 75 years ago a patch in Siberia was cold enough to freeze (gasp!) has totally changed my mind on peer-reviewed research. The clever scientists thought they could get away by making silly claims about the climate being a complex system which can have extreme temperatures on both ends of the scale even as the total energy of the system is going up, but NO MORE thanks to brave warriors like you!

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