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

The ancient creatures are emerging from the cold storage of melting permafrost.

The woolly rhino is one of the most preserved extinct megafauna, along with the 40,000-year-old remains of a giant wolf.

Some of them are still alive.

The moss was able to grow in the lab. The roundworms were 42,000 years old.

The history of ancient environments is revealed by the glimpse of organisms from Earth's distant past.

The melt has caused some concern about ancient viruses coming back to haunt us.

According to a study led by first author and microbiologist Zhi-Ping Zhong from Ohio State University, melting will lead to the loss of ancient, archived microbes and viruses.

Thanks to new methods for keeping ice core samples sterile, the researchers are able to get a better understanding of what lies within the cold.

The team was able to identify an archive of unique 15,000-year-old viruses from the ice cap of the Tibetan Plateau and gain insight into their functions.

Many viruses were deposited in the ice as a result of the gradual formation of the glaciers. The team said in their paper that the microbes could represent those in the atmosphere at the time of their deposit.

Studies have shown that changes in dust and ion concentrations correlate with changes in the environment.

The researchers discovered that 28 of the 33 viruses they identified had never been seen before in ancient times.

Matthew Sullivan, a microbiologist at Ohio State University, said that these are viruses that would have thrived in extreme environments.

The team compared their genetic sequence to a database of known viruses and found that the most abundant Viruses in the ice core samples were the ones that cause the methane cycle within ice.

They were related to the same viruses as the ones found in the plant and soil habitats.

The team concluded that the frozen viruses probably originate from the soil or plants.

The greatest danger is what else the melting ice is releasing, which is huge amounts of methane and carbon.

The ice could hold insights into past environmental changes and the evolution of Viruses too.

"We don't know a lot about Viruses andMicrobes in these extreme environments, and we still have a lot of unanswered questions," said Earth scientist Lonnie Thompson.

How do organisms deal with climate change? When we go from an ice age to a warm one, what happens?

There is a lot more to be done.

The study was published in a journal.

The first version of this article was published in July of 2011.