In 2015, a team of scientists from the United States and China traveled to Tibet to collect samples from the Earth's oldest glacier.
Earlier this month, they published an article on the bioRxiv preprint server detailing the discovery of 28 new virus clusters in 15,000-year-old ice and warning that climate change could release ancient viruses.
The team drilled 50 meters of the glacier to obtain two ice cores, which then underwent a three-stage decontamination protocol.
The researchers then used microbiological methods to detect viruses in the samples.
These methods identified 33 groups of viruses, including, in particular, 28 ancient viruses that scientists have never encountered before.
“This study establishes ultrapure microbial and virus sampling procedures for glacial ice that complement prior silicone decontamination techniques and extend clean procedures to viruses for the first time,” the researchers wrote.
As scientists pointed out in their study, climate change is currently threatening both our ability to comprehensively catalog these tiny life forms and our ability to stay safe.
“At a minimum, [ice melting] could result in the loss of microbial and viral archives that could be diagnostic and informative for the Earth's past climatic regimes,” they write.
“However, in the worst case, melting ice can lead to the release of pathogens into the environment.”
Sources: Photo: https://www.wlrn.org/post/ancient-viruses-lurk-frozen-caribou-poo#stream/0
