Permafrost is the frozen mix of soil, ice, and rocks that occupies nearly a quarter of the land in the northern hemisphere. It contains vast amounts of animal and plant remains along with bacteria and other microorganisms. All it has been frozen – stuck in time – for millennia.
Permafrost has become a topic of great concern because much of it is thawing at an alarming rate because of human-caused climate change. The worry is that as permafrost thaws, microbes living in the soil will begin to break down the organic matter, causing massive amounts of carbon dioxide and methane to enter the atmosphere.
But there is another thing to worry about: the bacteria and microbes in the permafrost. Some of these microorganisms date back tens of thousands of years. They may be types that no longer live in our world. They may have effects on modern living things that are unpredictable.
A team of geologists and biologists from Colorado University Boulder went deep into the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Permafrost Tunnel in central Alaska. There they extracted samples of permafrost dating back some 40,000 years. They added water to the samples and incubated them at temperatures comparable to what might be increasingly common in the warming Arctic.
After a few months, they were able to produce robust colonies of ancient bacteria. The scientists believe that these microbes likely are not dangerous for people, but they have kept them in sealed chambers, nonetheless.
There are many open questions about the potential for ancient organisms to cause problems in the modern world. It is just an added factor in what is already a very troubling situation in the warming Arctic.
