The worm turns

In the episode of The X Files called "Ice," Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are sent with a small team of scientists to a remote Arctic research station in order to investigate the murder-suicide of its entire crew.  When they get there, they find one survivor -- the station's mascot, a dog, who shows signs of hyperaggressive behavior (obviously) reminiscent of what afflicted the researchers.

They eventually figure out what happened, but not before two of the people accompanying them are dead, and both Mulder and the third scientist are obviously afflicted with the same malady.  In digging up and thawing out permafrost, the researchers had inadvertently reanimated a deep-frozen parasitic nematode that causes drastic behavioral changes, and is transmissible from bites.  They do find a way to get rid of the infection, saving the lives of Mulder, the infected scientist, and (thank heaven) the dog, but the U.S. government destroys the base before any further study of the worm or its origins can be made.

It's a highly effective and extremely creepy episode, doing what The X Files did best -- leaving you at the end with the feeling of, "This ain't actually over."

I was forced unwillingly to recall my watching of "Ice" by two news stories this week.  In the first, scientists have "reawakened" -- deliberately this time -- a nematode that has been frozen for 46,000 years in the Siberian permafrost.

Dubbed Panagrolaimus kolymaensis, it's a previously unknown species.  This doesn't mean it's a truly prehistoric species; Phylum Nematoda is estimated to contain about a million species, of which only thirty thousand have been studied, classified, and named.  So it could well be that Panagrolaimus exists out there somewhere, in active (i.e. unfrozen) ecosystems, and the invertebrate zoologists just hadn't found it yet.

Still, it's hard not to make the alarming comparison to the horrific events in "Ice" (and countless other examples of the "reanimating creatures frozen in the ice" trope in science fiction).  This reaction is somewhat ameliorated by the fact that two-thirds of the nematode species known are harmless to humans, and even the ones that are parasitic usually aren't life-threatening.  There are a few truly awful ones -- which, for the sakes of the more sensitive members of my audience, I'll refrain from giving details about -- but most nematodes are harmless, so chances are Panagrolaimus is as well.

On the other hand, it doesn't mean that thawing frozen stuff out is risk-free, and the problem is, because of climate change, thawing is happening all over the world even without reckless scientists being involved.  The second study, conducted at the European Commission Joint Research Centre, appeared in a paper in PLOS - Computational Biology and described a digital simulation of a partially frozen ecosystem (that contained living microbes in suspended animation).  They looked at how the existing community would be affected by the introduction of the now reawakened species -- and the results were a little alarming.

It has been tempting to think that because the entire ecosystem has changed since the microbes were frozen, if they were reanimated, there'd be no way they could compete with modern species which had evolved to live in those conditions.  In other words, the thawed species would be unable to cope with the new situation and would probably die out rapidly.  In fact, that did happen to some of them -- but in these models, the ancient microbes often survived, and three percent of them became dominant members of the ecosystem.  

One percent actually outcompeted and wiped out modern species.

"Given the sheer abundance of ancient microorganisms regularly released into modern communities," the authors write, "such a low probability of outbreak events still presents substantial risks.  Our findings therefore suggest that unpredictable threats so far confined to science fiction and conjecture could in fact be powerful drivers of ecological change."

Now, keep in mind that this was only a simulation; no actual microbes have been resuscitated and released into the environment.

Yet.

Anyhow, there you have it.  Something new from the "Like We Didn't Already Have Enough To Worry About" department.  Maybe I shouldn't watch The X Files.  How about Doctor Who?  Let's see... how about the episode "Orphan 55"?  *reads episode summary*  "...about a future Earth so devastated by climate change that the remnants of humanity have actually evolved to metabolize carbon dioxide instead of oxygen..."

Or maybe I should just shut off the television and hide under my blankie for the rest of the day.

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The reanimators

An announcement a few weeks ago by microbiologist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University that he and his team had successfully resuscitated a 48,500-year-old virus from the Siberian permafrost brought horrified comments like, "I read this book, and it didn't end well" and "wasn't this an episode of The X Files?  And didn't just about everyone die?"  It didn't help when Claverie's team mentioned that the particular virus they brought back to life belonged to a group called (I shit you not) "pandoraviruses," and the media started referring to them by the nickname "zombie viruses."

Claverie's pandoravirus [Image courtesy of Chantal Abergel and Jean-Michel Claverie]

The team hastened to reassure everyone that the virus they found is a parasite on amoebas, and poses no threat to humans.  This did little to calm everyone down, because (1) not that many laypeople understand viral host specificity, and (2) shows like The Last of Us, in which a parasitic fungus in insects jumps to human hosts and pretty much wipes out humanity, have a fuckload more resonance in people's minds than some dry scientific paper.

What's scary about Claverie's study, though, isn't what you might think.  First, the good news.  Not only is the virus they found harmless to humans, the team is made up of trained microbiologists who are working under highly controlled sterile conditions.  Despite what the "lab leak" proponents of the origins of COVID-19 would have you believe, the likelihood of an accidental release of a pathogen from a lab is extremely unlikely.  (The overwhelming consensus of scientists is that COVID is zoonotic in origin, and didn't come from a lab leak, accidental or deliberate.)  So the obvious "oh my god what are we doing?" reaction, stemming from a sense that we shouldn't "wake up" a frozen virus because it could get out and wreak havoc, is pretty well unfounded.

What worries me is the reason Claverie and his team are doing the research in the first place.

Permafrost covers almost a quarter of the land mass of the Northern Hemisphere.  A 2021 study found that every gram of Arctic permafrost soil contains between a hundred and a thousand different kinds of microbes, some of which -- like Claverie's pandoravirus -- have been frozen for millennia.  A three-degree Celsius increase in global average temperature could melt over thirty percent of the upper layers of Arctic soil.

So potentially, what Claverie's team did under controlled, isolated conditions could happen out in the open with nothing to keep it in check.

Concern over this isn't just hype.  In 2016, melting permafrost in Siberia thawed out the carcass of a reindeer that had died of anthrax.  Once thawed, the spores were still viable, and by the time the incident had been contained, dozens of people had been hospitalized, one had died, and over two thousand reindeer had been infected.  Anthrax isn't some prehistoric microbe that scientists know nothing about, which actually acted in our favor; once it was identified, doctors knew how to treat it and prevent its further spread.

But what if the thawing frost released something we haven't had exposure to for tens of thousands of years, and that was unknown to science?

"We really don’t know what’s buried up there," said Birgitta Evengård, a microbiologist at Umeå University in Sweden, which in a few words says something that is absolutely terrifying.

So the hysteria over Claverie's reawakening of the "zombie virus" focused on the wrong thing.  The reanimators we should be worried about aren't Claverie and his team; they're us.  There were already a myriad excellent reasons to curb fossil fuel use (hard) and try to rein in climate change, but this study just gave us another one.

As always, the problem isn't the scientists; the scientists are the ones trying to figure all this out in time to prevent a catastrophe.  (And, if I haven't made this point stridently enough already, the scientists have been trying to warn us about the effects of climate change for decades.)  The problem is the fact that politicians, and the voters who elect them, have steadfastly refused to do a damn thing about a problem that we could have addressed years ago and that has so many potential horrible outcomes you'd think any one of them would be sufficient justification for acting.  

So how about we stop worrying about the wrong thing and face the fact that we're the ones who need to change what we're doing?

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Unearthing the time capsule

It's said that there's no cloud without a silver lining, but sometimes the silver lining just adds to the whole situation's poignancy.

That was my response to the new show (opening in May) at the British Museum called Arctic: Culture and Climate.  The exhibit will contain priceless archaeological finds from the Canadian and Siberian Arctic, including a nine-thousand-year-old woven birch basket, a necklace made of mammoth ivory, a variety of objects carved from walrus teeth, bone needles, headbands, a spirit mask, clothing made of reindeer fur, a bag crafted from salmon skin, and a fantastic array of other artifacts, some of which date back to thirty thousand years ago.

The problem, of course, is why this beautiful exhibit is even possible -- the melting of the Arctic permafrost because of anthropogenic climate change.

"As the Arctic is melting, the permafrost, the frozen ground, is melting as well," said exhibit curator, archaeologist Jago Cooper.  "The things that people were living with in that landscape, which are incredibly well preserved in that frozen ground, are coming out as the ground is melting...  Archaeologists have to find the objects before they disappear on the surface of the earth because they are exposed to the elements.  It’s like the Library of Alexandria being on fire… You’re plucking out these books which are coming out, and yes, it’s a remarkable window into life, all coming out of the ground in one go...  This is a treasure trove, but its story is tragic."

The fact is, the Arctic is the region of the Earth where the climate is changing the fastest; current estimates are that within eighty years, summers in the northern Arctic will be entirely ice and permafrost-free.  Entire communities are disappearing as frozen-solid soil capable of holding up house foundations turns into marsh.  The only place on Earth I can think of that is changing this drastically and this fast is the coast of my home state of Louisiana, where communities on the fringe of coastal marsh, such as Isle de Jean Charles, are being swallowed up as sea levels rise.  But since both the Arctic and coastal Louisiana are occupied by poor and/or marginalized people mostly belonging to ethnic minorities, there has been little if any attention paid to the devastation climate change is wreaking.

The effects on the Arctic are multiple and widespread.  The 2019 Arctic "report card" from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was not so much sobering as outright terrifying.  Its findings include:

• 2019 was the Arctic's second-warmest year ever recorded.  (The warmest was 2016.)  July 2019 was the warmest month since records started in 1850.
• Cold-water fish populations are shrinking and retreating north, disrupting the food chain and affecting populations of Arctic predators such as seals, walruses, and polar bears.
• The amount of ice melted from the Greenland Ice Sheet in 2019 tied for highest volume ever lost (with 2012).
• The ice at the very north is itself destabilizing.  Only one percent of the marine ice in the Arctic Ocean is over four years old, so the "permanent Arctic ice sheet" is a thing of the past.
• The loss of ice cover in the summer is causing a feedback loop as darker/more absorptive open ocean retains more of the summer's heat and ramps temperatures up further.  The summers for the past ten years have broken record after record for high temperatures and speed of warm-up.

Horrifying news.  But most countries seem to take the stance of "oh, well, it doesn't affect us," and continue to sit on their hands.  It immediately put me in mind of the old comic strip, one that has shown up in many contexts, from Nazi aggression before World War II to Wall Street speculation to the spread of terrorism, but which seems tragically apt here:

Sometimes I get tired of shouting "WILL YOU PEOPLE PLEASE WAKE UP AND FOR FUCK'S SAKE DO SOMETHING?"  Heaven knows I've hit on this topic enough times here at Skeptophilia, my readers must be getting sick of my ringing the changes over and over.  But given that there are still climate change deniers out there, and people are paying more attention to noted climatologists like Meat Loaf than the actual scientists, we can't afford to let fatigue silence us.

The problem is, the scientific papers and even the heartbreaking exhibits like the one opening soon at the British Museum are almost entirely reaching people who already know that anthropogenic climate change is happening, and simultaneously are unable to change policy.  I can virtually guarantee the politicians aren't reading science journals (in the case of Donald Trump, I seriously doubt he's ever read anything longer than the label on a soup can).  So it's a case where there are two hermetically-sealed groups -- the science community and informed laypeople, who know what's happening but are unable to change it, and the elected leaders, who are able to change it but are either uniformed or else willfully participating in the disinformation campaign.

So I'll keep blogging, and other concerned people will continue working toward getting the truth out there, but until we change things at the ballot box, my guess is that to paraphrase Douglas Adams, nothing will continue to happen.

My only hope is that by the time we are able to act, it won't already be past the tipping point.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is simultaneously one of the most dismal books I've ever read, and one of the funniest; Tom Phillips's wonderful Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up.

I picked up a copy of it at the wonderful book store The Strand when I was in Manhattan last week, and finished it in three days flat (and I'm not a fast reader).  To illustrate why, here's a quick passage that'll give you a flavor of it:

Humans see patterns in the world, we can communicate this to other humans and we have the capacity to imagine futures that don't yet exist: how if we just changed this thing, then that thing would happen, and the world would be a slightly better place. 

The only trouble is... well, we're not terribly good at any of those things.  Any honest assessment of humanity's previous performance on those fronts reads like a particularly brutal annual review from a boss who hates you.  We imagine patterns where they don't exist.  Our communication skills are, uh, sometimes lacking.  And we have an extraordinarily poor track record of failing to realize that changing this thing will also lead to the other thing, and that even worse thing, and oh God no now this thing is happening how do we stop it.

Phillips's clear-eyed look at our own unfortunate history is kept from sinking under its own weight by a sparkling wit, calling our foibles into humorous focus but simultaneously sounding the call that "Okay, guys, it's time to pay attention."  Stupidity, they say, consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; Phillips's wonderful book points out how crucial that realization is -- and how we need to get up off our asses and, for god's sake, do something.

And you -- and everyone else -- should start by reading this book.

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

Reality denial

What does it take for people to look at a belief they hold and say, "Okay, I guess I was wrong?"

I ask this because there is still a sizable number of people who call themselves "climate skeptics."  The better term would be "reality deniers."  They tend to fall into two groups -- ones who agree that the Earth is warming up but deny that humans have anything to do with it, and ones who say the Earth isn't warming at all.  Lately, the evidence has been piling up so soundly against the latter claim that more of the reality deniers are ending up in the first class, but honestly, they don't have any more evidence on their side than the ones who deny anthropogenic climate change outright.

It's a little like the anti-vaxx nonsense.  How many studies, with how many thousands of test subjects, do you need before you admit that there's no connection between vaccination and autism?  Or that the risks of vaccination are far outweighed by the benefits?  The evidence is incontrovertible at this point, yet we still have people refusing to vaccinate their children -- which is why measles has been rearing its ugly head in the United States in the past few months. 

Look, on the one hand, I get it.  If you've been vocally in support of a claim, and it turns out the claim was wrong, it's kind of embarrassing to admit it.  Plus, there's the sunk-cost fallacy working against you -- if you've put a lot of energy and time supporting something (or someone), and it turns out your support was unwarranted, it can be less emotionally wrenching to put on blinders and continue your support rather than to admit you were taken in.

But honesty is more important than pride, here.  Especially since in the case of climate change, the long-term habitability of the Earth is at stake.

So at the risk of ringing the changes on a topic I've already beaten unto death:  just this week, three more studies were released showing that climate-wise, we're in big trouble.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA]

First, we have a paper in the Journal of Glaciology, authored by Regine Hock, Andrew Bliss, Ben Marzeion, and Rianne Giesen, of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska - Fairbanks, looking at the rate of mass loss from glaciers, and finding that just taking into account the smaller land-based ice sheets, there will be a thirty to fifty percent loss in the next eighty years, contributing 25 centimeters to the sea level.

When you consider the fact that this does not take into account the far greater contribution of the huge Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets -- which are melting at an unprecedented rate -- you'd be right to be alarmed.

You'd also be right to relocate away from the coast.

"The clear message is that there’s mass loss—substantial mass loss—all over the world," said lead author Regine Hock, in a press release from the University of Alaska - Fairbanks.  "The anticipated loss of ice varies by region, but the pattern is evident.  We have more than 200 computer simulations, and they all say the same thing...  Even though there are some differences, that’s really consistent. Our study compared 214 glacier simulations from six research groups around the world, and all of them paint the same picture."

The second study, released by the European Space Agency, takes data from the GlobPermafrost Project, using data from the Copernicus Sentinel 2 satellite program to estimate the rate of loss of permafrost from the Arctic -- and are finding that what we are seeing is the beginning of a positive feedback loop.

And don't read "positive" as "good."  Here, "positive" means something that keeps getting worse -- i.e., the "snowball effect."

The problem is, when permafrost melts, it unlocks (literally) millions of tons of carbon that had been stored in the frozen subsoil.  This not only leads to slumping (one of the factors the GlobPermafrost Project measured) but causes the release of both carbon dioxide and methane, each of which is a significant contributor to the greenhouse effect.

If you're not scared enough yet, the main finding of the project is that our estimates of the rate of permafrost melting were too small -- by an order of magnitude.

The last study is the one that should cause the deniers to admit defeat and retreat in disarray -- but probably won't.  The paper, which has already passed full peer review, will be released in the Journal of Geophysical Research in June.  What it does is look at the data from GISSTEMP, one of the main computer models used to predict temperature change, and backpedals the model over a hundred years to see whether it's in agreement with what the global average temperature actually did...

... and found that the model predicted the temperature to within an inaccuracy of 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit.

"We’ve made the uncertainty quantification more rigorous, and the conclusion to come out of the study was that we can have confidence in the accuracy of our global temperature series," said lead author Nathan Lenssen, a doctoral student at Columbia University, in a press release from NASA.  "We don’t have to restate any conclusions based on this analysis."

"The Arctic is one of the places we already detected was warming the most. The AIRS [Atmospheric Infrared Sounder] data suggests that it’s warming even faster than we thought,” said Gavin Schmidt, co-author of a study that supported the Lenssen et al. results.  "Each of [these analyses]  is a way in which you can try and provide evidence that what you’re doing is real.  We’re testing the robustness of the method itself, the robustness of the assumptions, and of the final result against a totally independent data set."

And this result -- like all of the studies that have gone before it -- is unequivocal.

At this point, there's only one question we should be asking the politicians who are still in denial about what we're doing to the Earth.  "What would it take to change your mind?"  Because if what we've already seen from the climatologists isn't convincing, it's hard to know what would be.

And if the politicians answer, "Nothing would change my opinion, my mind is made up," it's time to vote them right the hell out of office, and elect some people who actually care about reality -- and about whether the world our grandchildren inherit will still be habitable.

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In 1919, British mathematician Godfrey Hardy visited a young Indian man, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in his hospital room, and happened to remark offhand that he'd ridden in cab #1729.

"That's an interesting number," Ramanujan commented.

Hardy said, "Okay, and why is 1729 interesting?"

Ramanujan said, "Because it is the smallest number that is expressible by the sum of two integers cubed, two different ways."

After a moment of dumbfounded silence, Hardy said, "How do you know that?"

Ramanujan's response was that he just looked at the number, and it was obvious.

He was right, of course; 1729 is the sum of one cubed and twelve cubed, and also the sum of nine cubed and ten cubed.  (There are other such numbers that have been found since then, and because of this incident they were christened "taxicab numbers.")  What is most bizarre about this is that Ramanujan himself had no idea how he'd figured it out.  He wasn't simply a guy with a large repertoire of mathematical tricks; anyone can learn how to do quick mental math.  Ramanujan was something quite different.  He understood math intuitively, and on a deep level that completely defies explanation from what we know about how human brains work.

That's just one of nearly four thousand amazing discoveries he made in the field of mathematics, many of which opened hitherto-unexplored realms of knowledge.  If you want to read about one of the most amazing mathematical prodigies who's ever lived, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Thomas Kanigel is a must-read.  You'll come away with an appreciation for true genius -- and an awed awareness of how much we have yet to discover.

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

Hell's gate

As a diversion from less cheerful subjects like what is currently happening in Washington, D. C., today we will consider: the Gates of Hell.

The interesting thing about the whole concept of hell is that it's connected to Christianity, and yet there's not much of a mention of it in the bible.  The Old Testament version, Sheol, was not really the traditional flaming inferno; it was more of a gray, dreary place cut off from hope and light, sort of like Newark but with less traffic.  The concept of a fire-and-brimstone version of hell doesn't seem to come up until the New Testament, for example Matthew 10:28 and Mark 9:43, where we are introduced to such fun notions as "the fiery furnace" and "unquenchable fire" into which you get pitched if you break the Ten Commandments and commit the Seven Deadly Sins, unless you're also a billionaire fast-talking con man, in which case you get elected president of the United States instead.

Wait, I said I was going to keep this post apolitical.  My bad.

Because of the mention of fire, there's been a picture developed that hell is a hot place underground, which has of course connected it in some people's mind with volcanoes and other subterranean phenomena.  There are a variety of places on Earth that have been considered possible candidates for gates to hell, three of which I describe below.

First, we have the Batagaika Crater in Siberia, which locals have nickname the "Hellmouth."  It's a pretty impressive feature, to be sure:

At its widest, it's a kilometer across and 87 meters deep, and is getting bigger.  The crater has nothing to do with hell, though, unless you're talking about the manmade hell we're creating by ignoring the human causes of climate change; it's something geologists call a megaslump, when removal of groundwater and thawing of permafrost cause massive subsidence.  So it's pretty awful, but doesn't have much to do with the punishment of the damned.

A second candidate is the Necromanteion of Baiae, a tunnel system near the city of Naples which apparently hosted a magical oracle who was supposed to be able to communicate with the spirits of the dead.  She would enter the tunnel, breath the magical vapors, and come back and tell the locals what the dead had to say for themselves, which mostly was confusing, garbled nonsense, that the oracle's handlers then got to interpret whatever way they wanted.

What the dead probably should have told the oracle was "it's a stupid idea to breathe magical vapors in an area of high volcanic activity," because the gases coming out of the tunnel were high in sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, both of which are quite toxic, and explain her confusion without any magical explanation needed.  Baiae is near the Campi Flegrei, or burning fields, an area of fumaroles and boiling mud pits that illustrate that Mount Vesuvius didn't exhaust its capacity for violence when it destroyed Pompeii in 79 C. E.

Last, we have Darvaza, in the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan.  Like Batagaika, Darvaza is due to the actions of people -- in this case, a natural gas drilling facility that went very, very wrong.  At some time in the 1960s -- given that we're talking about the Soviets, here, there's no certain information about precisely what happened when -- the ground collapsed underneath a gas-drilling rig, and during the collapse the methane seeping from the walls of the crater ignited.  People expected that it'd burn itself out quickly.

It didn't.

Darvaza is still burning today, and has become a tourist attraction for travelers who don't mind the fact that (1) it reeks of sulfur, (2) if you stay there long enough, the fumes will make you violently ill,  and (3) there are no amenities for miles around.  But if you're an adventurous sort, it's certainly something you won't see anywhere else on Earth.

So that's a trio of candidates for being the doorway to hell.  If none of these float your boat, however, there are actually dozens of others.

And that's not even counting Newark.