19 February 2022 | New Scientist | 49organisms. “When we do metagenomics, we do
see sequence signals corresponding to regular
viruses,” he says. Some of these are distinctly
unwelcome, including poxviruses and African
swine fever virus. “We see many classical
viruses in terms of sequence,” says Claverie.
“But of course we don’t try to revive those,
because that would be dangerous and silly,
and we don’t want to be part of the next
pandemic.” Nevertheless, the real risk, he
argues, is that dangerous viruses might
accidentally escape from permafrost.
Parts of the frozen north are now being
opened up, Claverie says. For example, in
Siberia, opencast coal mines are sometimes
dug close to people’s homes. This entails
removing layers of permafrost that can be
hundreds of thousands of years old. “You don’t
know what is there,” he says. This is all being
done in the open, not in some biosecure
laboratory. “Here is the real danger.”
The National Academies agree. Delegates
at the 2019 meeting concluded that we need
increased disease surveillance in the Arctic
to spot any outbreaks as quickly as possible
and nip them in the bud. This is basic public
health practice, but the challenge will be to get
the systems up and running in remote areas,
where the Indigenous people are sometimes
suspicious of Western medicine.
For most of us, the thing to do is to keep this
in perspective. The danger is real and needs
dealing with – but it isn’t likely to herald the
end of the world. “I don’t think that the current
thinking is that some global pandemic is just
going to thaw out from the Arctic and spread
around the globe,” says Vick-Majors. “But it’s
certainly a threat to northern communities.”
People living in the Arctic and in places such
as Siberia are already seeing their environment
melt around them. Now, they face the additional
threat of deadly infections. Unless we take
action, the 2016 anthrax outbreak could be
the first of many. ❚genome of the 1918 Spanish flu virus. A variola
virus, related to the one that causes smallpox,
was found in a 300-year-old Siberian mummy.
And 700-year-old frozen caribou faeces turned
out to contain genetic traces of two viruses,
albeit not ones that infect us.
A class of microbes known as giant viruses
have also turned up. In 2014, a team led by Jean-
Michel Claverie at Aix-Marseille University in
France found them in Siberian permafrost.
These pithoviruses were different from most
known viruses – much larger and with more
elaborate genomes – and had remained intact
in the ice for 34,000 years. They pose no danger
to us, because they infect single-celled animals
called protozoa. But their Stone Age origin
raises an intriguing possibility that thawing
permafrost could expose people to pathogens
that infected now-extinct ancestral humans
who once lived in the region (see “Neanderthal
colds and Denisovan flu”, left).
Claverie’s team has found other viruses too –
or at least their genes – in studies looking at
the genetic material of whole communities ofDE
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Michael Marshall is a freelance
science writer based in Devon, UK“ Researchers have
grown bacteria from
8-million-year-old
Antarctic ice”
A melting glacier
in Patagonia (left)
and disturbed
permafrost in
Russia (below) may
both yield disease-
causing microbesThe many pathogens
in permafrost include
anthrax bacteriaSH
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