随着全球变暖，北极冰层融化，可能释放出数百万年前的古老瘟疫，这些瘟疫从未在空气中传播过，人类免疫系统对此毫无抵抗力。文章探讨了北极冰层中可能存在的古老瘟疫，以及它们对人类的潜在威胁。

🦠 **古老瘟疫的威胁**: 由于全球变暖，北极冰层融化，可能释放出数百万年前的古老瘟疫，这些瘟疫从未在空气中传播过，人类免疫系统对此毫无抵抗力。这些古老瘟疫可能包括在人类出现之前就存在的病原体，这意味着我们的免疫系统对它们毫无准备。

🥶 **北极冰层的威胁**: 北极冰层不仅保存着古老的瘟疫，还保存着近代的致命病原体。例如，研究人员在阿拉斯加发现了1918年流感病毒的残留物，这种病毒曾造成全球5亿人感染，1亿人死亡。此外，科学家怀疑天花和鼠疫也可能被困在西伯利亚的冰层中。

🌡️ **融化的风险**: 虽然专家警告说，许多这些病原体可能无法在融化后存活，但已经有多起案例表明，这些古老的病原体可以在适当的条件下复活。例如，2005年，科学家复活了32,000年前的极端嗜热细菌，2007年复活了800万年前的细菌。

🦌 **现实的威胁**: 2016年，一名男孩因炭疽感染而死亡，另有20人感染。这起事件是由永冻土融化导致的，融化的永冻土暴露了被炭疽菌感染的驯鹿尸体，导致炭疽菌释放到环境中，感染了2,000头驯鹿。这表明，古老的瘟疫已经开始对人类构成现实的威胁。

💀 **潜在的灾难**: 随着全球变暖的持续，北极冰层融化将越来越快，释放出更多古老的瘟疫，这将对人类构成巨大的威胁。这些瘟疫可能导致大规模的传染病爆发，造成严重的人员伤亡和经济损失。

🩺 **应对措施**: 为了应对这一威胁，我们需要采取积极的措施，包括加强对北极地区的监测，研究开发针对古老瘟疫的疫苗和治疗方法，并做好应对大规模传染病爆发的准备。

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ancient-plagues

 

During our recent discussion of climate change, someone linked me to this New York Magazine piece making the case for doomism.

I disagree with it pretty intensely, but most of my complaints are already listed in the sidebar (some scientists also complained, so they had to add a lot of sidebar caveats in) and I don't want to belabor them.

The section I find interesting is the one called Climate Plagues:

There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years — in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice.

The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu. They actually extracted it from the cadaver of a frozen woman. that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million — about 5 percent of the world’s population and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.

Experts caution that many of these organisms won’t actually survive the thaw and point to the fastidious lab conditions under which they have already reanimated several of them - the 32,000 year old "extremophile" bacteria revived in 2005, an 8 million-year-old bug brought back to life in 2007, the 3.5 million-year-old one that a Russian scientist self-injected just out of curiosity - to suggest that those are necessary conditions for the return of such ancient plagues. But already last year, a boy was killed and 20 others infected by anthrax released when retreating permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the bacteria at least 75 years earlier; 2,000 present-day reindeer were infected too, carrying and spreading the disease beyond the tundra.