Science & Technology

1,700 unknown viruses discovered in melting glacier water

By T.K. Randall
September 1, 2024 ·  1 comment

Glaciation on the Tibetan Plateau. Image Credit: CC BY 2.0 Jan Reurink In the plot of classic science fiction movie The Thing, a team of researchers inadvertently unleashes a hostile alien entity that had been frozen in the Antarctic ice for millions of years.

While this hasn't happened in the real world (yet), it is not unheard of to find frozen organisms in ice that have not only thawed out, but that also have the potential to actively infect things.

This was the case recently when scientists conducting a study of a glacier in Tibet discovered a whopping 17,000 viruses in an ice core sample dating back 41,000 years.

This amount of viral information is 50 times greater than anything found in a glacier before.

Those concerned about these viruses triggering some sort of pandemic, however, needn't be as none of these 17,000 are capable of infecting humans - they can only affect single-celled organisms.Even so, it does open the possibility of something that could infect humans being thawed out in the future, potentially unleashing some ancient virus on today's population.

On the plus side, such discoveries are helping scientists understand more about our planet's history.

"Among these glacier archives are viruses that potentially played key ecological roles in the past before freezing," the study authors wrote.

According to co-author Matthew Sullivan, they dictated evolution and diversity "from the bottom up".

"These kinds of data are just so foundational for asking any questions about what Earth looked like previously," he said.

"Collecting these 1,700 genomes now empowers scientists doing glacial work elsewhere to unlock the stories that are in these other ice freezers, so to speak."

Source: Popular Science | Comments (1)

Tags: Virus, Glacier