41,000-year-old ‘zombie viruses’ discovered frozen 20,000ft up mountain – & they could solve mysteries of ancient Earth
SCIENTISTS have discovered thousands of ancient “zombie viruses” trapped under ice 20,000ft up a mountain.
The 1,700 viruses are thought to be 41,000-years-old and could answer many key questions about the history of mankind.
Researchers stumbled upon the shocking find as they braved the hostile, remote environment of the Tibetan Guliya Glacier to collect ice cores.
The 100 metre long ice cylinders are cut from glaciers and hold vital information about the past.
Most of the viral genomes were completely unknown to the world of science and have never been uncovered before.
According to ABC News the viruses found were from nine different ancient time periods.
The research, reported by Nature Geoscience, provides scientists with a snapshot of how viruses have adapted to changes in climate over millennia.
Ninety-seven per cent of the viruses in the ice were new to science.
The discovery increased by a factor of 50 the amount of viral information from permafrost that scientists have gathered so far.
The researchers studied how these bacteria-infecting viruses changed over time and with variations in temperature over 41,000 years.
ZhiPing Zhong, first author on the new study and paleoclimatologist at Ohio State University said: “These time horizons span three major cold-to-warm cycles, providing a unique opportunity to observe how viral communities have changed in response to different climatic conditions.”
The discovery was made following an expedition involving a 60-person strong team of Chinese and American scientists.
They retrieved several ice cores from the glacier, which sits about 6096 metres above sea level.
To extract the core the researchers used a special machine that keeps it in one piece inside a drill.
Then a 10cm wide circle was carefully drilled more than 300 metres into the ice.
It was then cut into metre long sections for transport, requiring yaks, freezer trucks and an airplane before the delicate cargo finally made it to the lab.
It took almost a decade for the team to catalogue the ancient viruses after first sampling the ice cores in 2015.
We should be far more worried about new things evolving rather than old things coming back
Erin Harvey
The team believes their find has increased their understanding over viruses thousands of years old.
Ancient viruses trapped in permafrost for tens of thousands of years can potentially infect humans and spread around the globe.
Experts believe knowledge sharing and collaboration are the best ways to stop future pandemics.
But the international research team is not concerned about causing the next pandemic.
What are ‘zombie viruses’ and do they pose a risk?
The term “zombie virus” refers to viruses that have been inactive for a long time.
Scientists believe that some zombie viruses could cause serious diseases, according to National Institutes of Health.
They have warned that as ice melts with increasing temperatures viruses trapped underneath could be released.
A 2023 study by a team that has studied viruses in the Siberian permafrost identified 13 megaviruses that could infect humans; one of them was 48,500 years old.
The study results appear in the journal Viruses.
Professor Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University is the geneticist who led the 2023 study.
He has been working to examine viruses in Siberia since 2014, has said that he believes the threat to be understudied and real, reports Medical News Today.
While the viruses he has studied has only shown potential to infect amoebae the danger to human populations needs to be taken seriously.
Dr. William Schaffner is a professor of preventive medicine in the Department of Health Policy and a professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Tennessee.
He told Medical News Today that while the viral potential does exist, it is conditional on specific factors:
“I think it’s rather remote, but it’s there: You would have to, first of all, have the virus still be able to be resuscitated, right?
“And it would have to be in some fashion transmitted to a human being. Then, of course, the virus would have to have the inherent capacity to be transmitted readily from person to person.
“So you have a series of steps, if you will, that has to take place before that could happen.”
Lonnie Thompson, a paleoclimatologist and glaciologist at Ohio State University, said: “Glaciers represent some of the cleanest environments on Earth.
“They contain extremely low biomass.”
“Members of our glaciological team routinely drink meltwater from these glaciers when we are drilling the ice cores.”
But, a particularly aggressive unearthed ancient virus or bacteria could be a danger if it infected humans or animals.
Erin Harvey, a virologist at the University of Sydney who wasn’t involved in the study, said the vast majority of the viruses in the permafrost infect bacteria, not humans.
“I think it’s very unlikely that [the researchers] could defrost something that could cause a problem,” she said.
“We should be far more worried about … new things evolving rather than old things coming back.”