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Permafrost
– permanently frozen land and soil – is thawing and releasing
massive carbon and methane emissions, toxic mercury, and ancient
diseases. Permafrost holds an estimated 15 billion tonnes of carbon.
“That’s
about twice as much carbon in the atmosphere, and three times as much
carbon than that stored in all the world’s forests”, says Sue
Natali, a postdoctoral research fellow studying the effects of
thawing permafrost due to climate change. She explains that between
30% and 70% of the permafrost may melt before 2100, depending on how
effectively we respond to climate change. “The 70% is business as
usual, if we continue to burn fossil fuels at our current rate, and
30% is if we vastly reduce our fossil fuel emissions… Of the 30-70%
that thaws, the carbon locked up in organic matter will begin to be
broken down by microbes, they use it as fuel or energy, and they
release it as CO2 or methane.” Around 10% of the carbon that does
defrost will probably be released as CO2, amounting to 130-150
billion tonnes. That is equivalent to the current rate of total US
emissions, every year until 2100.
“We
are seeing a big increase in the thaw of permafrost”, confirms
Emily Osborne, program manager for the Arctic Research Program, NOAA,
and editor of the Arctic Report Card, an annual peer-reviewed
environmental study of the Arctic. As a direct result of rising air
temperatures, she says, the permafrost is thawing and “the
landscape is physically crumbling as a result… things are changing
so fast, and in ways that researchers hadn’t even anticipated.”
The
2017 Arctic Report Card pulled no punches: “Arctic shows no sign
of returning to a reliably frozen region”.
The
2018 Arctic report card speculates that, “diseases like the Spanish
flu, smallpox or the plague that have been wiped out might be frozen
in the permafrost.” A French study in 2014 took a
30,000 year-old virus frozen within permafrost,
and warmed it back up in the lab. It promptly came back to life, 300
centuries later.
"Permafrost
is a very good preserver of microbes and viruses, because it is cold,
there is no oxygen, and it is dark," says evolutionary biologist
Jean-Michel
Claverie
at Aix-Marseille University in France. "Pathogenic viruses that
can infect humans or animals might be preserved in old permafrost
layers, including some that have caused global epidemics in the
past."
For
instance, scientists
have discovered fragments of RNA from the 1918 Spanish flu virus in
corpses buried in mass graves in Alaska's tundra. Smallpox and the
bubonic plague are also likely buried in Siberia.
In
a 2011 study,
Boris Revich and Marina Podolnaya wrote: "As a consequence of
permafrost melting, the vectors of deadly infections of the 18th and
19th Centuries may come back, especially near the cemeteries where
the victims of these infections were buried."
In
a
2005 study,
NASA scientists successfully revived bacteria that had been encased
in a frozen pond in Alaska for 32,000 years. The microbes, called
Carnobacterium
pleistocenium,
had been frozen since the Pleistocene period, when woolly mammoths
still roamed the Earth. Once the ice melted, they began swimming
around, seemingly unaffected. Scientists managed to revive an
8-million-year-old bacterium
that
had been lying dormant in ice, beneath the surface of a glacier in
the Beacon and Mullins valleys of Antarctica. In the same study,
bacteria were also revived from ice that was over 100,000 years old.
In
a
2014 study,
a team led by Claverie revived two viruses that had been trapped in
Siberian permafrost for 30,000 years. Known as Pithovirus
sibericum
and Mollivirus
sibericum,
they are both "giant viruses", because unlike most viruses
they are so big they can be seen under a regular microscope. They
were discovered 100ft underground in coastal tundra. Once
they were revived, the viruses quickly became infectious.
We
could even see viruses from long-extinct hominin species like
Neanderthals and Denisovans, both of which settled in Siberia and
were riddled with various viral diseases. Remains of Neanderthals
from 30-40,000 years ago have been spotted in Russia. Human
populations have lived there, sickened and died for thousands of
years.
"At
the moment, these regions are deserted and the deep permafrost layers
are left alone," says Claverie. "However, these ancient
layers could be exposed by the digging involved in mining and
drilling operations. If viable virions are still there, this could
spell disaster...The possibility that we could catch a virus from a
long-extinct Neanderthal suggests that the idea that a virus could be
'eradicated' from the planet is wrong, and gives us a false sense of
security...If the pathogen hasn't been in contact with humans for a
long time, then our immune system would not be prepared. So yes, that
could be dangerous."" says Claverie.
Mercury
is also entering the food chain, thanks to thawing permafrost. The
Arctic is home to the most mercury on the planet. The US Geological
Survey estimates there’s a total of 1,656,000 tonnes of mercury
trapped in polar ice and permafrost: roughly twice the global amount
in all other soils, oceans, and atmosphere. Natali explains that,
“mercury often binds up with organic material in places where you
have high organic matter content… organism’s bodies don’t
remove it, so it bio-accumulates up the food web. Permafrost is
almost the perfect storm – you have a lot of mercury in permafrost,
it is released into wetland systems, those are the right environment
for organisms to take them up, and then [it] heads up the food web.
That’s a concern for wildlife, people, and the commercial fishing
industry.”
Osborne
accepts that “the Arctic is greening”. But adds that, “warmer
temperatures also increase the prevalence of viruses and disease, so
we’re seeing a lot more caribou and reindeer becoming more sickly
as a result of this warming climate… it is just not an environment
that is suited to thrive at these warmer temperatures.”
Natali
also says that many areas are experiencing “Tundra browning”: the
higher temperatures lead surface water to evaporate into the
atmosphere, causing plants to die off. Other areas are experiencing
sudden flooding due to the ground collapsing. “It’s not happening
in 2100 or 2050, it’s now”, says Natali. “You hear people say
‘we used to pick blueberries over there’, and you look over there
and it’s a wetland.”
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