Featured Image Credit: Carlos Duarte/kappaphoto/Getty
A virus that died long before our time has now been revived by scientists after nearly 50,000 years.
Warmer temperatures in the Arctic means that the frost in the area is beginning to thaw.
More specifically, its permafrost is finally starting to melt.
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Permafrost relates to any ground that has remained completely frozen for over two years continuously, and some of which has been coated in ice since the last ice age.
With this thawing comes the revival of life that has been lying dormant in ice for a long time.
Ancient viruses are a particularly dangerous and potentially deadly organism that is awakening from the permafrost and could pose devastating risks to humans and animals.
Speaking to CNN, climate scientist from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, Kimberley Miner, said: “There’s a lot going on with the permafrost that is of concern, and [it] really shows why it’s super important that we keep as much of the permafrost frozen as possible.”
Permafrost is found in a fifth of the Northern Hemisphere, across places like Alaska, Canada and Russia.
And to better understand the risks involved with being exposed to previously frozen viruses, scientists have revived some to test them.
Jean-Michel Claverie, an Emeritus professor of medicine and genomics at the Aix-Marseille University School of Medicine hopes to find out whether these so called “zombie viruses” are still infectious.
The oldest strain of virus taken as a sample was around 48,500 years old and was extracted from 52 ft below the ground.
The youngest sample was 27,000 years old and was found in the stomach contents and coat of a woolly mammoth’s remains..
Shockingly, it was found that the strains were still alive and still very much infectious if exposed to another living thing.
Talking to CNN, Claverie said: “We view these amoeba-infecting viruses as surrogates for all other possible viruses that might be in the permafrost.
“We see the traces of many, many, many other viruses. So we know they are there. We don’t know for sure that they are still alive.
“But our reasoning is that if the amoeba viruses are still alive, there is no reason why the other viruses will not be still alive, and capable of infecting their own hosts.”
In fact, it’s happened before when an outbreak of “zombie anthrax” killed over 2,000 reindeer and made 13 people unwell in Siberia after 75 year old spores were released from melting permafrost.
