The tantrum – Greenland’s melting permafrost or polar ice is said to not only spill water into the ocean, but also captured viruses.
Recently, due to global warming, ice melted in Greenland and 6 billion tons of water per day went into the high seas.
In addition to the impact on the environment, this melting ice has the potential to release viruses and microbes that were previously trapped in the ice.
Is this virus also the same condition as Captain America? In the film version, Captain America is forced to sink a plane into sea ice in Greenland to prevent a massive detonation of a bomb in 1945.
He was found frozen in Arctic ice in 2011. Despite being trapped in an iceberg for 66 years, Steve Rogers was able to come back to life.
Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics and ice sheet expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said the first thing to understand is that the mysterious microbes accumulate on the ground, not in the polar ice cap.
Meanwhile, the polar ice caps contain huge amounts of the greenhouse gases CO2 and methane.
Therefore, if the ice melts, this gas will come out and cause uncontrollable climate change.
“Permafrost is already melting from top to bottom in many areas,” Romanowski says.
According to him, although the underground ice sheet remains frozen throughout the year, most of the upper ice sheet has shifted due to melting.
“We are seeing that in the northernmost part of the Canadian Arctic, where the permafrost temperature is still around -14°C, it has melted from above. This means that part of the material that has been frozen for thousands of years, is no longer frozen,” he quoted Unearthed Greenpeace as reported by Nation World News, Sunday, July 24, 2022.
“It’s a recent development, only in the last 10 or 20 years.”
Rapidly rising temperatures in this region will gradually add to the active layer of permafrost. This ice sheet is called active because in summer it is not in the form of ice but in the form of water.
Even so, the permafrost does not need to be completely thawed to free the ground-freezing microorganisms from the ice gel.
An active layer that enlarges and remains active for a long time becomes a new habitat when an increase in the amount of unfrozen water is sufficient to activate certain biological processes.
In fact, a microbe or virus may take the opportunity to be awakened from a long sleep, moving towards talik, the layer above the permafrost that rarely freezes.
Virologist Jean-Michel Claverie of the University of Aix-Marseille and his wife, Chantal Abergel, say that ancient viruses trapped in permafrost can survive and come back to life.
“The idea that bacteria can last a very long time, I think is certainly accepted. How long is the rest of the debate? Is it a million years? 500 thousand years? Is it 50 thousand years?” Clavery said.
Claverie and his wife then used viral DNA taken from the ice sheet around the Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia and infected the amoeba to see if the virus was still acting as intended.
“It’s proof of principle that we run in the lab. We can revive viruses from ancient permafrost samples. So far we haven’t reached 30,000 years, but maybe it will at some point,” Abergel said. ,
However, much remains unknown about viruses and microbes trapped in extreme environments such as the polar ice caps.
In a worst-case scenario, melting snow could spread dangerous diseases to the surrounding environment, Forbes reports.
The reason is that researchers have found intact smallpox and Spanish flu viruses in 100-year-old frozen tissue samples.
Then an anthrax outbreak in Siberia five years ago is also thought to be the result of a pathogen preserved in deer carcasses.
