Trapped in the ice

Today in the "I've Seen This Movie, And It Didn't End Well" department, we have: scientists digging into glacial ice and finding heretofore-undiscovered species of viruses and bacteria.

Just this week, a paper called "Glacier Ice Archives Fifteen-Thousand-Year-Old Viruses" was released as a preprint on bioRxiv, detailing work by a team led by Zhi-Ping Zhong of Ohio State University.  Here's what the scientists themselves write about the research:

While glacier ice cores provide climate information over tens to hundreds of thousands of years, study of microbes is challenged by ultra-low-biomass conditions, and virtually nothing is known about co-occurring viruses.  Here we establish ultra-clean microbial and viral sampling procedures and apply them to two ice cores from the Guliya ice cap (northwestern Tibetan Plateau, China) to study these archived communities...  The microbes differed significantly across the two ice cores, presumably representing the very different climate conditions at the time of deposition that is similar to findings in other cores.  Separately, viral particle enrichment and ultra-low-input quantitative viral metagenomic sequencing from ∼520 and ∼15,000 years old ice revealed 33 viral populations (i.e., species-level designations) that represented four known genera and likely 28 novel viral genera (assessed by gene-sharing networks).  In silico host predictions linked 18 of the 33 viral populations to co-occurring abundant bacteria, including Methylobacterium, Sphingomonas, and Janthinobacterium, indicating that viruses infected several abundant microbial groups.  Depth-specific viral communities were observed, presumably reflecting differences in the environmental conditions among the ice samples at the time of deposition. 

On the face of it, it's unsurprising they're finding new viruses, because we find new viruses wherever we look in modern ecosystems.  Viruses are so small that unless you're specifically looking for them, you don't see them.

But four new genera of viruses is a little eyebrow-raising, because that means we're talking about viruses that aren't closely related to anything we've ever seen before.

This, of course, brings up the inevitable question, which was the first thing I thought of; what if one of these new viruses turns out to be pathogenic to humans?  The majority of viruses don't cause disease in humans, but it only takes one.  Science fiction is rife with people messing around with melting ice and releasing horrors -- this was the basic idea of The Thing, not to mention The X Files episode "Ice" and best of all (in my opinion) the horrifying, thrilling, and heartbreaking Doctor Who episode "The Waters of Mars," which is in my top five favorites in the entire history of the series.

So I'm hoping like hell the research team is being cautious.  Not that it ever made any difference in science fiction.  Somebody always fucks up, and large amounts of people end up getting sick, eaten, or converted to some horrifying new form that goes around killing everyone.

Lest you think I'm just being an alarmist because I've watched too many horror movies, allow me to point out that this sort of thing has already happened.  In 2016, permafrost melt in Siberia released frozen anthrax spores that sickened almost a hundred people, one fatally, and killed over two thousand reindeer -- after that region not seeing a single case of anthrax for at least seventy years.

On the other hand, it's understandable that the scientists are acting quickly, because the way things are going in the climate, glaciers will be a thing of the past in fairly short order.  Glaciers and polar ice sheets are time capsules, layer by layer preserving information about the climatic conditions when the ice was deposited, even trapping air bubbles that act as proxy records giving us information about the atmospheric composition at the time.  (This is one of the ways we've obtained carbon dioxide concentrations going back tens of thousands of years.)

However, it also preserves living things, including some that seem to retain their ability to be resuscitated nearly indefinitely.  I try not to panic over every little risk, but I have to admit this one has me spooked.  We don't have a stellar track record for caution, but our track record for saying, "Oh, yeah, this'll work!" and then unleashing a catastrophe is a good bit more consistent.

So let's be careful, okay, scientists?  I'm all for learning whatever we can learn, but I'd rather not be turned into a creepy evil being with a scaly face dripping toxic contagious water all over the place.  Call me picky, but there it is.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is scarily appropriate reading material in today's political climate: Robert Bartholomew and Peter Hassall's wonderful A Colorful History of Popular Delusions.  In this brilliant and engaging book, the authors take a look at the phenomenon of crowd behavior, and how it has led to some of the most irrational behaviors humans are prone to -- fads, mobs, cults, crazes, manias, urban legends, and riots.

Sometimes amusing, sometimes shocking, this book looks at how our evolutionary background as a tribal animal has made us prone all too often to getting caught up in groupthink, where we leave behind logic and reason for the scary territory of making decisions based purely on emotion.  It's unsettling reading, but if you want to understand why humans all too often behave in ways that make the rational ones amongst us want to do repeated headdesks, this book should be on your list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!] 

Rising tide

At what point does choosing to ignore the facts cross the line into being morally responsible for what happens?

Because I think we've reached that point with respect to climate change.

Folks, we've been warning people about this since the early 1980s.  James Burke's seminal documentary After the Warming first aired in 1989, and predicted not only the dire consequences of anthropogenic climate change, but the resistance of the powers-that-be to doing anything to halt it.  (If you watch it now, many of its predictions sound like history -- his timeline for what was going to happen from 1990 to the present came so eerily true that it almost makes me want to believe in precognition.)  However much Al Gore is derided for his politics, his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth has also proved to be prescient.

Scientific paper after scientific paper -- peer-reviewed, based in hard data -- has demonstrated incontrovertibly that our world is warming.  There is no controversy amongst the climate scientists any more.  And still we shrug our shoulders at politicians who brand climate change as "liberal claptrap" (Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California), or those who say that if it's real at all, it will be "beneficial to society" (Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma).  Scientists who research climate have faced gag rules, funding cuts, and harassment from the likes of Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, who somehow, bafflingly, has ended up chairing the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

This all comes up (again) because of a study by Columbia University climate scientist James Hansen et al., who last week released a paper in the Journal of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics that is rightly scaring the absolute shit out of anyone capable of reading a scientific paper (thus disqualifying Rohrabacher, Inhofe, and Smith).  The title of the paper is unequivocal: "Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms: Evidence From Paleoclimate Data, Climate Modeling, and Modern Observations that2◦C Global Warming is Highly Dangerous."  (Note: the link is to a draft released last year; the paper itself appeared after extensive peer review, and with only minor modifications, in JACP last Tuesday.)

[image courtesy of photographer Angskar Walk and the Wikimedia Commons]

If the title by itself doesn't spook you enough, take a look at this excerpt from the abstract:

There is evidence of ice melt, sea level rise to +5–9 m, and extreme storms in the prior interglacial period that was less than 1 ◦C warmer than today.  Human-made climate forcing is stronger and more rapid than paleo forcings...  We argue that ice sheets in contact with the ocean are vulnerable to non-linear disintegration in response to ocean warming, and we posit that ice sheet mass loss can be approximated by a doubling time up to sea level rise of at least several meters.  Doubling times of 10, 20 or 40 years yield sea level rise of several meters in 50, 100 or 200 years... Ocean surface cooling, in the North Atlantic as well as the Southern Ocean, increases tropospheric horizontal temperature gradients, eddy kinetic energy and baroclinicity, which drive more powerful storms...  Recent ice sheet melt rates have a doubling time near the lower end of the 10–40 year range. We conclude that 2 ◦C global warming above the preindustrial level, which would spur more ice shelf melt, is highly dangerous.  Earth’s energy imbalance, which must be eliminated to stabilize climate, provides a crucial metric.

Co-author Eric Rignot put it more bluntly in an interview with Slate:

Ice sheet loss is non linear by nature.  You push the ice sheet one way, they do not react; you push them more, they start reacting; you keep pushing and they fall apart...  If we get there, we won't be able to fix it.

Among the scarier predictions of the Hansen et al. paper is a sea level rise of five to nine meters.  Do you recognize what this means?  The states of Florida, Delaware, and most of southern Louisiana would be underwater.  As would the nations of Bangladesh and the Netherlands.  All of the world's coastal cities would be inundated, with the exception of a few that have higher ground, like Seattle and San Francisco -- which would then become a string of islands.  This isn't talking about frost-free winters and warmer summers, and having to run your air conditioner more; this is talking about turning a significant proportion of humanity into eco-refugees.

Climate scientist Anna Liljedahl, of the University of Alaska, has said that the trends she's seeing are evidence of runaway warming.  The situation in the Arctic is dire.  The permafrost is experiencing widespread melting, with a resultant additional contribution of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere:

The scientific community has had the assumption that this cold permafrost would be protected from climate warming, but we’re showing here that the top of the permafrost, even if it’s very cold, is very sensitive to these warming event...  At the places where we have sufficient amounts of data we are seeing this process happen in less than a decade and even after one warm summer.

We have reached the point where ignoring the facts and ignoring or ridiculing the predictions of the people who are trained to understand the Earth's systems is a profoundly immoral stance.  There's a principle from Roman law that applies here: "Qui tacet consentire videtur, ubi loqui debuit ac potuit."  "Those who remain silent, when they should have spoken up, may be considered to have agreed."  If you support politicians who are complicit in hoodwinking the American citizenry with regards to the magnitude of this problem, you participate in that immorality and bear some of the responsibility for the outcome.

Which in this case, is increasingly looking like it will be horrific on a scale we have never seen before.