Black Summer at The North Pole
You probably haven’t noticed, but Siberia is melting. A place universally considered a barren frozen wasteland has been experience massive summer heatwaves for the better part of a decade. The permafrost, permanently frozen ground that has remained frozen fro millennia, has begun to rapidly melt, collapsing into vast sinkholes, and releases massive bursts of methane and fire into the atmosphere. This has led to political instability and massive economic toll. However, a smaller, but equally dangerous threat lurks in this ravaged ecosystem.
In the Yomalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (a state in The Russia Confederation,) a cache of recently-thawed reindeer carcasses contaminated with ancient, preserved anthrax bacteria infected several herds of nomadic reindeer with the deadly bacterium. This resulted in the death of over 2000 caribou, and the infection further spread into the surrounding region, hospitalizing 100 people and killing a 12 year old child. This was in 2016 and the world has gotten much warmer since then. There are untold uncharacterized pathogenic microbes swelling within massive tracks of frozen ground and glacial lakes across the globe, and each one of these is a potential reservoir for new and deadly diseases. Or in this case, old and deadly diseases.
Balmy temperatures increase the habitable range of a myriad of viral and bacterial vectors, including the mosquito that carries both West Nile as well as Dengue. In addition, warmer temperatures are often beneficial to the replication of the virus itself, with higher temperatures often accelerating the rate replication, transmission and mutation. Global warming induced habitat destruction is pushing humans closer than ever to large pools of animals known to be viral and bacterial host species, such as bats and rabbits. The recent zoonotic outbreaks of both Zika as well as Covid-19 indicate that more diseases are likely to follow suit. With no end to increasing temperatures, it is critical that researchers continue to monitor the spread of novel, or ancient, infectious diseases and that their reports be made public and free to access.
