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"About
75 years ago, a reindeer fell sick to anthrax. Laying down to die
upon the frozen ground of Siberia, the poor creature’s carcass
froze in the Arctic climate. With it, the deadly infectious bacteria
teeming in the deer’s body were stilled into an inert latency.
"In
the decades after, billions of tons of carbon bellowed out into the
world’s air from fossil-fuel burning and carbon-spewing machines
spreading around the globe. The heat-trapping properties of these
carbon gasses subsequently warmed the Arctic and the frozen
permafrost that was this ill-fated deer’s — and the anthrax’s —
tomb.
"For
the deer, there would be no second life, as rising temperatures bring
decomposition 75 years after its death. But as the flesh of that deer
warmed, the long-frozen anthrax bacteria began to revive. Over the
past week, this climate-change-released anthrax spread back into the
deer population, killing about 2,300 reindeer. It also leapt into
humans, resulting in dozens of hospitalizations, with half the
victims as children — and so far, one human death."
Anthrax-Spewing Zombie Deer Are the Least of Your Warming Planet Worries
Diseased
carcasses dating to World War II aren’t the only surprises coming
our way, courtesy of climate change.
2
August, 2016
Climate change is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get. In northern Russia, you get anthrax.
Climate
ChangeConditions that are melting Arctic permafrost there recently
thawed the carcasses of deer felled by anthrax some 75 years ago,
when World War II raged. Warmer temperatures then reactivated the
infectious disease, which can survive in hibernation for decades.
Dozens of people have been hospitalized, half of them children, with
eight confirmed cases and one death. Making matters worse, a heatwave
combined with the anthrax outbreak may have killed more than 2,300
deer—new ones.
As
apocalyptic as this development may seem, it’s perhaps the least
worrisome byproduct of warming near the top of the earth, which is
heating up the fastest. Retreating ice and softening permafrost, both
in the Arctic and elsewhere, have already begun to yield other
curiosities and dangers, some of which can do a lot more damage than
a pile of dead deer:
Frozen
cemeteries give up their dead
Twenty-five
years ago, during a foray into the Ötztal Alps between Austria and
Italy, two German hikers came across the remains of a less-fortunate
peer. They assumed he died within recent times, but Ötzi, as the
cadaver was nicknamed, turned out to be more than 5,000 years old. He
was embedded in ice through the rise of human civilization. Since
then, bodies that are hundreds of years old, or more, have turned up
in northern British Columbia, Bolivia, and the Russian steppe.
Melting ice has uncovered soldiers and airplane pilots who met their
fates in more recent decades.
Climate
change may be the best thing to happen to anthropologists in years.
For the rest of us? Not so much.
This
place is a mammoth dump
The
annals of climate change are filled with items too small to affect
the big picture, but memorable nonetheless: shrinking sheep, nicer
spiders, and even increases in kidney stones. Then there’s mammoth
dung.
Humanity
isn’t the first mammal to roam the northern tundra, nor the
biggest. But people may be the most discreet with our bodily
functions. Not so the woolly mammoth: In pockets of permafrost are
their digestive remains. Nine years ago, a widely circulated news
report raised the specter of ancient dung-driven emissions.
The research community hasn’t returned to the topic as a major risk factor. Yet.
The research community hasn’t returned to the topic as a major risk factor. Yet.
Bacteria
have plenty of reheated planet to eat
Thawing,
century-old deer that spew anthrax sound like the beginning of a
Hollywood zombie thriller. But a bigger, less-exciting horror film is
also playing out as permafrost becomes sometimes-frost.
Scientists
in 2014 discovered what may turn out to be a true workhorse of the
warming world: bacteria that eat through thawing soil. These
organisms, including Methanoflorens stordalenmirensis, gobble up
nutrients and metabolize them into methane, a heat-trapping gas. Some
of it breaks down into carbon dioxide, which while much less damaging
to the atmosphere (molecule-per-molecule), sticks around for much,
much longer.
A
methane-burping bacterial colony here or there never hurt anybody.
But widespread Arctic melting may serve these microbes a feast of
geologic proportions. And that means potentially dangerous amounts of
methane pouring into an already toasty atmosphere. Permafrost stores
about double the carbon that the atmosphere does. The better the
bacteria do, the more carbon joins the sky, the warmer earth becomes.
Repeat
Last
year, researchers based mostly in the U.S. recommended stronger
monitoring of methane and CO2 emissions from the Arctic. But there’s
some good news: They say “increased permafrost carbon emissions in
a warming climate are more likely to be gradual and sustained rather
than abrupt and massive,” which may be the ultimate example of cold
comfort
Walking
a methane minefield
Before
the anthrax scare, Siberia's Yamal Peninsula attracted scientific and
media attention because pockets of methane gas began spontaneously
erupting, leaving craters a couple of hundred feet across and just as
deep. Russian scientists think the craters are caused by underground
gas leaking up toward the surface through fissures. With warming
temperatures, the methane expands until it blows its top.
Craters
formed in the last few years have begun to fill with water on their
way to becoming the first new lakes of the Human Epoch.
