Ancient 15,000-Year-Old Viruses Identified in Melting Tibetan Glaciers

Like the start of a horror movie, ancient creatures are emerging from the cold storage of now-melting permafrost: from incredibly preserved extinct megafauna like the woolly rhino, to the 40,000-year-old remains of a giant wolf, and bacteria over 750,000 years old.

Not all of them are dead. Centuries-old moss was able to spring back to life in the warmth of the laboratory. So too, incredibly, were tiny 42,000-year-old roundworms. 

These fascinating glimpses of organisms from Earth's long distant past are revealing the history of ancient ecosystems, including details of the environments in which they existed. But the melt has also created some concerns about ancient viruses coming back to haunt us.

"Melting will not only lead to the loss of those ancient, archived microbes and viruses, but also release them to the environments in the future," researchers write in a new study, led by first author and microbiologist Zhi-Ping Zhong from Ohio State University.

Thanks to new metagenomics techniques and new methods for keeping their ice core samples sterilized, the researchers are working on getting a better understanding of what exactly lies within the cold.

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