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As the glaciers melt what if monsters are revealed?

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Chris OConnor

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As the glaciers melt what if monsters are revealed?

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I don't mean literal monsters, but what if long dormant deadly pathogens are released as glaciers and permafrost melt?
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Robert Tulip

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Re: As the glaciers melt what if monsters are revealed?

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Yes. Here is an article from Scientific American about it. https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... ger-worry/

Anthrax killed a few thousand reindeer a few years ago, released from melting permafrost. There are also worries about smallpox and Spanish Flu.

Bigger risks include the spread of tropical diseases due to global warming, and the release of methane from the permafrost.
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Re: As the glaciers melt what if monsters are revealed?

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Hoo-boy, if you thought the last pandemic was bad, just wait 'til these diseases start to spread.

Mastadon Flu
Covid-19K BCE
Giant Beaver Pox
Saber tooth cat scratch fever
Mammoth worms
Neanderthal narcissistic personality disorder
Cro-magnon cancer, necrotizing, scrotal

:P :omg4: :omfg:
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Re: As the glaciers melt what if monsters are revealed?

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:laugh:
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Re: As the glaciers melt what if monsters are revealed?

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As the world warms up, vast tranches of permafrost are melting, releasing material that's been trapped in its icy grip for years. This includes a slew of microbes that have lain dormant for hundreds of millennia in some cases.

To study the emerging microbes, scientists have now revived a number of these "zombie viruses" from Siberian permafrost, including one thought to be nearly 50,000 years old – a record age for a frozen virus returning to a state capable of infecting other organisms.
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists ... in-siberia
While the literature abounds on descriptions of the rich and diverse prokaryotic microbiomes found in permafrost, no additional report about “live” viruses have been published since the two original studies describing pithovirus (in 2014) and mollivirus (in 2015). This wrongly suggests that such occurrences are rare and that “zombie viruses” are not a public health threat. To restore an appreciation closer to reality, we report the preliminary characterizations of 13 new viruses isolated from 7 different ancient Siberian permafrost samples, 1 from the Lena river and 1 from Kamchatka cryosol. As expected from the host specificity imposed by our protocol, these viruses belong to 5 different clades infecting Acanthamoeba spp. but not previously revived from permafrost: pandoravirus, cedratvirus, megavirus, and pacmanvirus, in addition to a new pithovirus strain.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 0.515937v1
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Re: As the glaciers melt what if monsters are revealed?

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Ancient germs aren't necessarily a danger for life now. Life now had a few thousand / million years to evolve since those germs were put in permafrost. So, that means, that our cells might be different enough from cells of ancient organisms that the germs will have a hard time infecting us. Well, at least some of the ancient germs probably won't infect us.
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Re: As the glaciers melt what if monsters are revealed?

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The Kaiju Preservation Society would look after them. After all, they're in a strange, and very dangerous place. It's lousy with humans, after all.
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