Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up 67
An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from Scientific American: Permafrost covers 24 percent of the Earth's land surface, and the soil constituents vary with local geology. Arctic lands offer unexplored microbial biodiversity and microbial feedbacks, including the release of carbon to the atmosphere. In some locations, hundreds of millions of years' worth of carbon is buried. The layers may still contain ancient frozen microbes, Pleistocene megafauna and even buried smallpox victims. As the permafrost thaws with increasing rapidity, scientists' emerging challenge is to discover and identify the microbes, bacteria and viruses that may be stirring. Some of these microbes are known to scientists. Methanogenic Archaea, for example metabolize soil carbon to release methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Other permafrost microbes (methanotrophs) consume methane. The balance between these microbes plays a critical role in determining future climate warming. Others are known but have unpredictable behavior after release...
It is clear that the warmer we make the Arctic, the weirder it will get, as temperatures at the surface become more extreme and thawing deepens. With the coalescence of microbes reawakening from the deep and surface conditions unprecedented in human history, it is challenging to assess risks accurately without improved Arctic microbial datasets. We should pay attention to both known unknowns, such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and unknown unknowns, including the potential risks from the resurrection of ancient and poorly described viral genomes from Arctic ice by synthetic biologists. For all of these reasons, we must come up with guidelines for future Arctic research. As travel through the region increases, the likelihood of pathogen export and import rises as well. The planetary protection guidelines that space agencies follow to prevent interplanetary contamination can provide a framework for how microbial investigation can safely continue. Biosurveillance measures must be put into place to protect communities in the Arctic and beyond. As the Arctic continues to transform, one thing is clear: as climate change warms this microbial repository during the 21st century, the full range of consequences is yet to be told.
It is clear that the warmer we make the Arctic, the weirder it will get, as temperatures at the surface become more extreme and thawing deepens. With the coalescence of microbes reawakening from the deep and surface conditions unprecedented in human history, it is challenging to assess risks accurately without improved Arctic microbial datasets. We should pay attention to both known unknowns, such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and unknown unknowns, including the potential risks from the resurrection of ancient and poorly described viral genomes from Arctic ice by synthetic biologists. For all of these reasons, we must come up with guidelines for future Arctic research. As travel through the region increases, the likelihood of pathogen export and import rises as well. The planetary protection guidelines that space agencies follow to prevent interplanetary contamination can provide a framework for how microbial investigation can safely continue. Biosurveillance measures must be put into place to protect communities in the Arctic and beyond. As the Arctic continues to transform, one thing is clear: as climate change warms this microbial repository during the 21st century, the full range of consequences is yet to be told.
Re: Trump wakes up in prison (Score:2)
So Trump Derangement Syndrome definitely has two sides ....
Have you tried lookin at the election relsluts as a pain relief?
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but seeing that you the subject up.
it is a bad thing to incarcerate a monarch.
but those folks that enable the monarch are fair game.
think nuremberg trials
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it is a bad thing to incarcerate a monarch.
That is why it is traditional to remove their head.
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you have to also do the same to everyone in the blood line.
and anyone that calls t***p a friend.
as xi said.
that is a lot of head
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but those folks that enable the monarch are fair game.
Burn the entomologists!
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sick.
disgusting.
and i can not unsee it.
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Did the t***p look like this?
https://agilityforex.com/wp-co... [agilityforex.com]
This one was titled "Deathhead Moth"
https://cdn.drawception.com/im... [drawception.com]
You can't keep the Butterdonald in prison! He can fly.
https://i1.wp.com/metro.co.uk/... [wp.com]
And don't forget, Donald is an actor!
https://www.fakefakenews.org/2... [fakefakenews.org]
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and unsure.
i am fine.
bye
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And the CIA provided the weapons and training for Osama Bin Laden's army, to fight against Russian occupation of Afghanistan.
10 years later Bin Laden is deemed a terrorist by a different administration.
The United States created their own problem in that region of the world. And they did not expect their trouble to "bite" back in the way and severity it did. A major oversight.
In the mean time I have learned from the US geopolitical endeavors that it is vitally important to ask the question: when did person
Yeah, yeah, ancient aliens^Wmicrobes, we know ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Except they missed milions of years of arms race between their cousins and us, and can be lucky, if the first silly little modern pathogen does not kill *them* first.
Now let me imagine somebody saying the diseases inside of Native Americans are dangerous while landing in America for the first time. I imagine him in a nice cozy blanket ...
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Re:Yeah, yeah, ancient aliens^Wmicrobes, we know . (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that's not how it works. The "arms race" between microbes isn't analogous to military technology.
Ancient microbes that have been dormant may no longer pose a threat to modern organisms, and so their defenses against those threats evolved away. Similarly, modern microbes that are not exposed to ancient microbes may not have had a chance to develop offensive tools against them.
A better analogy than "arms race" is probably something like rabbits. Rabbits seem like fuzzy little harmless critters, but they overran Australia in the 1950s to the point that they voraciously ate entire farm crops. Any organism that is not in its rightful place will either die quickly, or cause havoc in the new ecosystem. Our planet is a finely calibrated system of interconnected subsystems, and moving parts from one place to another breaks stuff in unpredictable and almost always bad ways.
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Agreed, evolution isn't some steady ascent to us all becoming glowing balls of energy. It's a constant local optimization process with some random walks thrown in.
Microbial defences can be expensive, and if they aren't being used it's best to get rid of them (kind of like why modern soldiers don't wander around in plate mail).
And even if they're not expensive, if they're not being used they'll probably break. Like all those skills you learned in school haven't used in decades.
An ancient microbe might be unr
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The microbes waking up is not about the microbes, it is about the methane they will produce consuming all the rotting vegetation et al, that has been there frozen for tens of thousands of years.
Where they messed up on climate change models. Is they modelled climate which is not the accurate way to do it. Climate is not climate, it is the combination of all weather events. As climate shifts so greater extremes in weather events become possible, and those more severe events drag along climate change with the
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The microbes waking up is not about the microbes, it is about the methane they will produce consuming all the rotting vegetation et al, that has been there frozen for tens of thousands of years.
Where they messed up on climate change models. Is they modelled climate which is not the accurate way to do it. Climate is not climate, it is the combination of all weather events. As climate shifts so greater extremes in weather events become possible, and those more severe events drag along climate change with them.
So climate change becomes more chaotic and unpredictable but chaos maths means it if likely to be much faster than claimed, due to extreme weather events. Really hot weather making it further north or south than expected. Melting ice, even evaporating it to bring it back down from the poles to dump lots and lots of rain.
Microbes waking up in metres deep frozen rotting vegetation, not frozen any more, that is a massive volume of methane to be produced. With that additional heat far more ice will be melted much sooner than they expected. To model climate you must model weather extremes to see how they will drag along climate change.
That would be the list of predicted scenarios. Maybe that is what scientists mean when they warn us about climate change and how there is a toiling point beyond which the process may not be easy to stop.
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That would be the list of predicted scenarios. Maybe that is what scientists mean when they warn us about climate change and how there is a toiling point beyond which the process may not be easy to stop.
Sorry I meant tipping point (stupid autocomplete)
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Re: Yeah, yeah, ancient aliens^Wmicrobes, we know (Score:2)
That's definately an exception to this rule.
End of Last Ice Age (Score:2)
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Agreed - especially since this has happened before at the end of the last Ice Age and early humans without modern science to help not only somehow survived the release of all the frozen pathogens that were released they positively thrived.
Have you read many first-person accounts of life at the end of the last Ice Age? Because even if the situations were comparable I'm not sure we know enough to say they didn't have a series of epidemics with 30% mortality.
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Have you read many first-person accounts of life at the end of the last Ice Age?
No, surprising as it may seem, modern archaeology doesn't seem to rely on first-person accounts but rather the artifacts and evidence humans leave behind. I do not know what sort of threshold of a mass die-back would be detectable by these means but I suspect a 30% die-back would have been noticeable given the effect it would have on trading etc.
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Have you read many first-person accounts of life at the end of the last Ice Age?
No, surprising as it may seem, modern archaeology doesn't seem to rely on first-person accounts but rather the artifacts and evidence humans leave behind. I do not know what sort of threshold of a mass die-back would be detectable by these means but I suspect a 30% die-back would have been noticeable given the effect it would have on trading etc.
I don't know the exact thresholds but I don't think the tracking of neolithic population levels is as precise as you think it is.
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Err, 3 out of 4 human species went extinct.
25k years off (Score:2)
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x files.
they had a story that discussed this topic.
the one thing that i have not found is.
melting the permafrost will raise the water level up how high
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the one thing that i have not found is.
melting the permafrost will raise the water level up how high
Just use CO2 levels as a proxy for water level, and you only have to find 2 charts to find the water level increase for x permafrost melting.
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Tell that to John Carpenter.
Why should they resist modern antibiotics ? (Score:2)
Bugs will only evolve resistance if they are exposed to antibiotics - ie most are killed and a few evolve resistance. They will not have genes hanging around to give them resistance as, if no other reason, having those extra genes is expensive and so makes them less fit.
They might have novel biology that we cannot hit; but it is highly likely that large parts of their biology is similar to today's bugs -- so we should have plenty to be able to deal with them.
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many antibiotics are produced by molds and bacterias, they've been around for billions of years
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
We should pay attention to both known unknowns, such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria,
I had no idea ancient humans let pathogens develop resistance to the antibiotics we use today and casually let them spread in the environment, where they still reside in melting permafrost today. I should have guessed though, people never change and our ancestors were probably just as lazy and uneducated about these things. I really need to catch up on ancient aliens week on the history channel, there’s so much I’m still likely missing.
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I had no idea ancient humans let pathogens develop resistance to the antibiotics we use today and casually let them spread in the environment, where they still reside in melting permafrost today
Yeah that was a Trump science project. He planned to clean it with bleach afterwards but it kind of got away.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
We should pay attention to both known unknowns, such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria,
I had no idea ancient humans let pathogens develop resistance to the antibiotics we use today and casually let them spread in the environment, where they still reside in melting permafrost today.
You laugh, but the fact is that our antibiotics mostly come from modern bacteria, which evolved those chemicals as a defense mechanism to be able to fend off territorial incursions by other modern bacteria. Most of the mechanisms that were useful for attacking million-year-old bacteria likely would not be useful against modern bacteria. Thus, those attack mechanisms likely would not have been conserved in their DNA over millions of years, or if they were, they would only be conserved in a tiny percentage of modern bacteria. So there's a very real possibility that none of the antibiotics we have now would be effective against million-year-old bacteria, because the particular vulnerabilities that they target might not even have existed in bacteria from so long ago.
Of course, some of the basics (alcohol, bleach, bismuth) probably will still be effective in any case, as will antibiotics derived from other bacteria from that era. And some of the modern antibiotics probably will be effective, because some antibiotics target pretty generic cell structures that probably existed millions of years ago, too. Either way, it isn't guaranteed.
They're realize it's 2020 (Score:4, Funny)
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If you want to discredit climate research, just keep on fear-mongering about "ancient microbes waking up". That is as much of a real risk as Egyptian Mummies spreading a curse.
Citation required - otherwise you're just makin' stuff up and what you said doesn't mean shit.
I'm not holding my breath for that citation though.
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If you want to discredit climate research, just keep on fear-mongering about "ancient microbes waking up". That is as much of a real risk as Egyptian Mummies spreading a curse.
If you really want to make climate research a Louis CK punchline, you might combine it with that cow fart argument.
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We have already discovered ancient microbes in ice cores, many times before. This isn't hypothetical stuff, it's already been documented and demonstrated rigorously in Antarctica and Greenland.
But you already knew that because you did research before firing off that methane fart of a comment, didn't you? Right?
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If you want to discredit climate research, just keep on fear-mongering about "ancient microbes waking up". That is as much of a real risk as Egyptian Mummies spreading a curse.
The risk here is that some of them produce Methane. That could easily get very bad.
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That's not a risk as current microbes are just as good at producing methane, and will as the muskeg thaws. There's also all the methane that is locked up in the permafrost.
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Seriously? Have you somehow overlooked that a whole large biome these microbes are perfectly adapted to is currently thawing?
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Perhaps. I was thinking that the current biome (including those in the relative south, ready to move north) has a lot of microbes already that are ready to produce methane and mostly adapted. An expert on this stuff I am not.
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The thing is the combination of these well-adapted microbes and the thawing of the environment they are well adapted to. As long as the environment was frozen, no issue. Now that it gets unfrozen, they become active and they are already right there, no need for a slow spreading process or anything. And there is no stopping this.
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Microbes spread pretty quick. I think your comparing a day vs a week. Even the week scenario is too quick. There's lots of present day microbes sitting on the top just waiting.
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No. Please read up on the actual situation. Obviously you are just trying to troll me.
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Have you got a pointer? Doing this search, https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hidd... [duckduckgo.com] just shows the usual about all the methane that is trapped in the permafrost and such. Maybe I misunderstood you but I thought you were talking about microbes breaking down the organic matter in the permafrost and creating even more methane.
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Advanced lifeforms, to be sure (Score:1)
Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up
That's more than can be said about Slashdot editors.
65 millions years ago (Score:2, Funny)
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I agree, you'll probably just get infected by a mind-eating amoeba and forget everything. Stay out of the water, kids.
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Quit crying about how many places you have herpes and put on a mask, covidiot!
Take that to the bank. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, crap (Score:3)
This is the first really big accelerator. Nobody really know how bad it will be, but it will at least offset all we an do to reduce our emissions for a long time.
So, a frozen tundra Asian wet market? (Score:1)
Okay, I'll say it ... (Score:2)
Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up
I welcome our recently-thawed, deep-frozen Arctic microbial overlords ...
[ Can't be any worse than the current Administration, :-) ]
though I suspect they'll be steadfastly against bleach and other disinfectants.
I am offended (Score:1)
I, for one (Score:1)
Awesome (Score:2)
24% of the land on earth is changing from frozen desert to arable land. Global warming is awesome!
Did you know you can't buy permafrost covered land in Northern Canada? The Queen of England owns all of it. I checked. Best you can do is a 99 year lease. I was going to buy a bunch of it and pass it on to my descendants.