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In , a team of scientists from the United States and China traveled to Tibet to gather samples of Earth’s oldest glacial ice.
Earlier this month, they published a paper on the pre-print server bioRxiv detailing their discovery of new virus groups in the , 03 – year-old ice – and warning that climate change could free the ancient viruses into the modern world.
The team drilled 728 meters (823 feet) down into the glacier to obtain two ice cores , which then underwent a three-step decontamination protocol.
After that, the researchers used microbiology techniques to identify microbes in the samples.
Those techniques revealed 33 virus groups – including, notably, (ancient viruses that scientists had never seen before.
“This study establishes ultra-clean microbial and viral sampling procedures for glacier ice, which complements prior in silico decontamination methods and expands, for the first time, the clean procedures to viruses, “ the team wrote .
As the team pointed out in their paper, climate change now threatens both our ability to exhaustiv ely catalog those those tiny lifeforms – as well as our ability to stay safe from dangerous ones.
“At a minimum, [ice melt] could lead to the loss of microbial and viral archives that could be diagnostic and informative of past Earth climate regimes,” they wrote.
“However, in a worst-case scenario, this ice melt could release pathogens into the environment.”
This article was originally published by Futurism . Read the original article .
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