Our planet is heating up and that’s causing Earth’s massive reserves of ice to melt. We know this will cause the sea levels to rise and global ocean currents to be thrown into chaos, but now experts are worried about another microscopic threat hiding in that very ice.
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00:00 [MUSIC]
00:03 Our planet is heating up, and that's causing Earth's massive reserves of ice to melt.
00:08 We know this will cause sea levels to rise and global ocean currents to be thrown into chaos.
00:12 But now experts are worried about another microscopic threat hiding in that very ice.
00:17 Scientists say there is growing evidence that dangerous pathogens might be dormant at the moment,
00:22 frozen in ice and time, but could thaw as the planet warms.
00:26 And they believe this is likely already happening.
00:28 There was an anthrax outbreak amongst residents and reindeer in northwest Siberia in 2016.
00:33 That outbreak killed 2,000 reindeer and one human.
00:36 And the source of it, experts now say, was an animal carcass that was frozen for ages before thawing in a warmer world.
00:42 And researchers have been able to recreate this type of thawing in a lab as well,
00:46 with scientists having previously revived a 50,000-year-old virus they found frozen in a lake.
00:51 What's more, DNA and RNA sequencing of viruses currently frozen in the ground and water of a lake in the high Arctic resulted in some troubling findings.
01:00 Not only do these virus family trees suggest their ability to infect humans,
01:04 but they also found that a higher glacial melt rate would result in higher infection rates as well,
01:09 with some wondering if new and terrible diseases will rear their heads,
01:12 or if currently eradicated ones like smallpox might become a common concern once again.
01:18 [music]