Get best of the week

Can the “Spaniard” like a zombie virus survive in permafrost?

NPR Editor’s Note: Media and Twitter have suggested that DNA fragments of the now defunct 1918 influenza pathogen can persist in permafrost and pose a threat to people if layers of frozen soil thaw as a result of global warming. A couple of years ago, our publication already investigated this question: can a dangerous pathogen (and at the same time similar ones) be reborn? In January 2018, the first version of this story was published.


Zach Peterson knows how to find adventure.

A 25-year-old teacher helped archaeologists dig up an 800-year-old log cabin far beyond the Arctic Circle on the north coast of Alaska.

They camped right on the coastline. For the next month, Peterson watched a giant flock of beluga whales splashing close to their parking lot. Once, he came across a hungry polar bear invading their camp, and also discovered the skull of another rare polar bear.

But the most interesting thing happened at the very end of the summer trip.

“I noticed a red spot on the front of my leg,” Peterson says. “It was the size of a dime. It was terribly hot, it was impossible to touch the wound. "

The affected area increased rapidly. “A few days later it became the size of a baseball,” he recalls.

Peterson realized that his skin infection was rapidly progressing. And, it seems, he knows where he picked up the infection: from a creature preserved in permafrost.
EDISON Software - web-development
We at EDISON are also ready to help in the study of the bowels of the Earth. We developed AmberLight, a program for seismic and geological modeling of oil and gas fields based on the interpretation of seismic data. Depending on the tasks and the available data, seismic models are constructed using different methods - Delaunay triangulation, nearest neighbor method, cricking, multi-level B-splines, etc.








Nano zombies attack? Or maybe just a "red herring"?


Recently, fears of the possible consequences of climate change have been increasing. One of the hypothetical consequences is pathogenic zombie microorganisms. Bacteria and viruses, slumbering for centuries in frozen ground, will return to life when the permafrost of the Arctic begins to melt.

The idea received a powerful impetus in the summer of 2016, when a major outbreak of anthrax struck Siberia.

Then, as a result of abnormally hot summers for the Arctic latitudes, the thick layer of permafrost thawed, which is why the reindeer carcasses stored in it began to warm up. Animals died of anthrax, and when their bodies thawed, bacteria and bacteria returned to life. Anthrax spores spread across the tundra. Dozens of people were hospitalized, a 12-year-old boy died.

At first glance, it looked as if anthrax somehow came to life after a 70-year freeze. So, what is next? Which pathogen will be reborn next? Hi, smallpox? Hello, 1918 flu?

The media picked up the topic of “zombie pathogens” and began to actively disseminate it.

"Climate change ... can bring back long-forgotten pathogens," lamented Atlantic. "Many of these pathogens can survive the thaw in the Arctic - and if they succeed, researchers warn, they can infect all of humanity."

“Scientists are witnessing how a gloomy theory becomes a reality: infectious microbes come alive from a deep freeze,” Scientific American beats the alarm.

But something does not fight in these scary stories about "zombie pathogens." Hole in the evidence presented as in Swiss cheese.

A biologist studying giant viruses is cited as a key researcher , but these are not the viruses that terrorize humanity. These so-called virus-monsters have evolved to dwell in cold soil, deep under the ground, not in a warm human flesh on earth.

In relation to zombie bacteria, anthrax is a “ red herring”". Anthrax from time to time "reborn" from frozen soil for millennia. Bacteria wait for the cold periods, spending many years "wintering" in the ground, until conditions allow them to return to life. Even in medieval Europe, it was possible to observe fields dotted with the corpses of sheep who died from anthrax. The French called these places "cursed fields."

And now, suspicions are also arising that the Arctic, like a pantry of frozen champignons, is filled with pathogens that are even more dangerous than anthrax. In the vast expanses of permafrost, the size of two US, tens of thousands of human bodies remained in frozen soil. Some of these people died from smallpox. And some from the "Spanish" - a strain of influenza that swept the whole world in 1918 and killed more than 50 million people.

But is there really any evidence that these deadly viruses survived a “mild thaw” and are ready to cause new outbreaks of dangerous diseases?

To understand this, I went to the ends of the world, to the place where Zac Peterson spent his amazing northern summer in order to see with his own eyes what creatures and diseases the permafrost hides.

And I was not disappointed.

“We have a seal head here”


At the top of the cliff, Peterson and several other students, kneeling, delving into a pit the size of a Volkswagen minivan.

In 2013, a severe storm brought down the top of the cliff. Now the 800-year-old hut barely holds on the edge of the cliff, near the city of Utkiagvik, in Alaska. A team of archaeologists is trying to carry out emergency excavations before the ancient structure engulfs the ocean.


A team of volunteers rushing to dig up an ancient hunting hut near Utiagwick, Alaska, a city formerly known as Barrow. Zachary Peterson

Until recently, local hunters used this hut for hundreds of years. In one corner of the house, traces of the carcasses of animals once killed were preserved.

“We have a seal head and the bulk of the carcass,” Peterson says, showing two mummified seals lying in vile porridge from thawing permafrost and decaying marine mammals flesh inside the hut.

Seals begin to warm up. What used to be their internal organs oozes from their dead bodies. This place stinks like a rotting tuna sandwich. Peterson's trousers are covered in black oily mucus.


In the past few years, severe storms have destroyed large sections of Alaska's coastline. White bags are used to prevent the ancient log cabin from slipping into the sea. Zachary Peterson

Seals stuck in permafrost for 70 years. They are extremely well preserved. You can distinguish between skin, mustache, something similar to a fin.

“This is what makes the Arctic places amazing,” says Ann Jensen, an archaeologist at Ukpeavik Iupiat, an excavator. “Surprisingly preserved,” she adds. "As if the animal just fell and died recently."

Then something more eerie is extracted from the ice: a human molar.

“It's just a tooth,” Jensen reassures. “People lose them all the time. And they just throw it away. ”

Now this hunting hut is no longer a burial ground. Jensen doesn't think that bodies are buried here. She is a world expert in the extraction of human remains from the permafrost of the Arctic.

“I probably dug up more graves than anyone else,” she says. “I would rather not dig a burial place. But most of my work went on behind this occupation. ”

What she just did not dig out: from individual parts of the body - once, according to her stories, she found her hand in a block of ice - to a huge cemetery right here, on the Arctic coast.

In the late 1990s, graves in this cemetery began to be washed out into the sea, this section of the Arctic coast is slowly but surely being destroyed. The local government turned to Jensen to save the bodies. She saved dozens, those that were buried closer to the shore. But hundreds more graves remain at risk of erosion.

Jensen claims that these mummified human remains, some of which have lain here for centuries, are just as well preserved as the seals in a log cabin.

“One little frozen girl from Ukvitavik is even better preserved than these seals,” Jensen recalls. "She was about the same age as my daughter, I was very sad."

She was buried in a meat cellar with children sledges.


Back in 1994, erosion exposed the body of a 6-year-old girl, completely enclosed in an ice block for 800 years. “Water leaked to her burial site,” says Jensen. “So we got it right in a piece of ice.”

The little girl was neatly wrapped in a duck leather parka with a fur collar. Her parents buried her, along with the little sleds, in their meat storage cellar.

Her body was so well preserved that Jensen sent her to Anchorage so that the pathologists performed an autopsy. One of those doctors was Michael Zimmerman, a paleopathologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who has been studying mummified bodies for over 30 years.

“In the frozen bodies from Alaska, all organs are in place and easily identified,” says Zimmerman. “This is not like the Egyptian mummies, where everything inside wrinkled and dried out.”

Doctors can easily determine what a person died from. That little frozen girl was killed by hunger. But Zimmerman also came across other causes of death for those who were recovered from permafrost. Among the causes of death were infections. In one case, it was a mummy from the Aleutian Islands, according to signs a person died from pneumonia. Zimmerman found bacteria inside the body. They seemed to freeze in time.

“We examined them under a microscope, they were inside the lungs,” says Zimmerman.

But were these "zombie" bacteria? Can they come back to life and infect other people? Zimmerman tried to revive microorganisms. He took a piece of lung tissue and warmed it, "feeding" nutrient fluid.

“But nothing has grown,” complains Zimmerman. “Not a single cell.”

Zimmerman says there is nothing surprising in the fact that the bacteria died. The bacteria that cause pneumonia have evolved in such a way as to live in humans at body temperature, rather than in cold soil.

“We are dealing with microorganisms that have been frozen for hundreds of years,” he says. "I do not think they will come to life."

What about viruses like smallpox or Spanish flu? “I think this is highly unlikely,” Zimmerman is convinced.

In 1951, one young graduate student tested this. Johan Haltin traveled to a tiny city near Nome, Alaska, and unearthed the mass grave of people who died of the flu in 1918.

He made micro cuts in the lungs of the deceased and returned home with them. Then he tried to grow the virus in the laboratory.

“I was hoping I would get an isolated live virus,” Khaltin shared his memories with our publication in 2004, “And I couldn’t. The virus is dead. ”

“Looking back, I understand that this is for the best,” he added.

For the better, yes. But this is what is alarming. 45 years later (in the mid-90s), Khaltin tried again to get the 1918 flu virus.

At that time, he was a pathologist in San Francisco. He heard that scientists are trying to decipher the genome of the virus. At the age of 73, Khaltin returned to Alaska. There he cut a piece of lung from a woman who died during the epidemic of the “Spanish woman”, whose name was Lucy.

“Using his wife's garden shears, Haltin opened Lucy's mummified rib cage. There he found two perfectly preserved frozen lungs - the very tissue that he was interested in, ”says the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Her lungs were amazing, full of blood,” Haltin shared with the journalist.

At the same time, a Canadian group of scientists went in search of the 1918 influenza virus in Norway. They exhumed seven bodies. But not one of them was frozen, and the team was unable to recover any particles of the virus.

In the 1990s, Russian scientists tried to recover smallpox from a body extracted from permafrost. They found fragments of the virus, but the virus itself could not be grown under laboratory conditions.

All these attempts - and all these failures - make you wonder: maybe it's not about melting permafrost? Maybe you should not worry about pathogenic zombie microorganisms, but about what scientists are doing in the laboratories?

It will end only when the full seal sings


When I wrote this story in December, I ended it with a warning about the dangers of human curiosity. I was then convinced that the only way for a "zombie" to rise from the grave of permafrost is if the scientist resurrects Frankenstein from the past in his laboratory. The likelihood of this, of course, seemed extremely small.

But then I received an email from Zach Peterson: “After I stood knee-deep in the thawed mucus of marine mammals ... the doctors treated me for a seal finger infection,” Peterson wrote. A purple-red infection is visible in the photo covering the front of his knee.

This is a bacterial infection that affects hunters in contact with body parts of dead seals. The infection spreads quickly in the joints and bones. Sometimes people lose fingers and hands.

Doctors did not check Peterson's infection, whether it really is a "seal finger". The sore was treated with simple antibiotics.

The source of this specific infection that Peterson contacted was for him only those log cabin seals that had been frozen in permafrost for decades.

“Even if it was likely that it was something else,” Peterson wrote to me, “I still tell others that I was struck by a strain of sealer disease that was 800 years old in an ice trap.”

Zack Peterson may well be the first known victim of the "zombie bacteria" that arose as a result of thawing permafrost in Alaska.

Translations on the Edison Blog:

Top 50 gaming franchises
with over a billion revenue		Will Airbnb survive the coronavirus?
[spoiler: yes]

More articles:


All Articles