A few days ago the global warming alarmist comedy act was that rising sea levels would flood NASA launch sites. It would be tough to top that inadvertent humor but the Washington Post science blogger, Rachel Feltman, gives it a good challenge. She warns that melting arctic ice could release a giant deadly virus. If it sounds like cheesy horror movie, you could be right as we shall see but first, take it away Rachel!
Let's get one thing out of the way really quickly: The ancient, giant virus recently discovered in melting Arctic ice is not going to kill you.
But here's the bad news: It's not the first ancient virus that scientists have found frozen — it's the fourth found since 2003. And you can be sure it won't be the last. And with climate change causing massive melts, it's not totally alarmist to suggest that something deadly might one day emerge from a long, icy sleep.
...The newly discovered, 30,000-year-old virus is reported in a paper published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Mollivirus sibericum is a whopping .6 microns across, making it what scientists call a giant virus. In addition to towering over modern viruses (and even some bacteria), size-wise, these ancient microbes had a lot more genes.
M. sibericum has more than 500 genes, compared to just 9 in HIV. One of the previously discovered giant viruses, Pandoravirus, has a staggering 2,500 genes. Scientists are still figuring out what that means for a virus, and what it says about the way viruses evolved — and how we should deal with them.
If scientists can confirm that humans and animals won't be susceptible to sibericum, they're going to go ahead and wake it up so they can study it. But they're proceeding with caution. These viruses may be ancient, but they've also been kept in nature's own deep freezer. They want to be sure they're not reviving anything potentially harmful.
"A few viral particles that are still infectious may be enough, in the presence of a vulnerable host, to revive potentially pathogenic viruses," lead researcher Jean-Michel Claverie of France's National Centre for Scientific Research told the AFP.
But careful scientists may not be enough to save us from ancient microbes. Claverie and his colleagues worry that these viruses, which now seem to be fairly common in permafrost, could be released on their own by way of melting ice or human activity — oil drilling, for example.
Does this ancient deadly virus released by melting arctic ice scenario sound familiar? It sure does to your humble correspondent who finally remembered a very similar scenario from 2009 in the form of a very cheesy global warming straight to DVD poor copycat of 1982's version of "The Thing." It was called The Thaw and all you have to do is substitute deadly parasites unlocked by melting arctic ice for viruses and you have Rachel Feltman's horror scenario:
You can be one of the very, very few to view parts of it in the following trailer. Just use just a little imagination and you can replace those nasty parasites with deadly viruses.
