If Earth is going to have its revenge on us, here’s how it should do it:
Climate change may increase the risk of viruses becoming capable of infecting new hosts in the Arctic, suggests a study of genetic material from a Canadian lake.
Canadian scientists found that an increase in glacier melt at Lake Hazen, the Arctic’s largest lake by volume and a location in George Clooney’s film The Midnight Sky, was linked to a greater risk of viral spillover, where a virus infects a new host for the first time. Melting glaciers were considered a proxy of climate change, which is causing their retreat globally.
The team from the University of Ottawa, led by Audrée Lemieux, gathered soil and sediment from the lake and sequenced the RNA and DNA in the samples. The researchers found signatures of viruses and their potential hosts including animals, plants and fungi. They then ran an algorithm recently developed by a different research team, which assesses the chance of coevolution or symbiosis among unrelated groups of organisms. The algorithm allowed the team to gauge the risk of spillover, and suggested this was higher in lake samples nearer to the point where larger tributaries – carrying more meltwater from nearby glaciers – flow into the lake. [“Climate change linked to risk of viruses jumping species in the Arctic“, Adam Vaughan, NewScientist, (4 September 2021, paywall)]
Doesn’t sound up front enough? I’ll just be glad I’m not living on the eastern seaboard, because it appears glaciers are double-barrelled:
The rapid melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet is likely to trigger catastrophic earthquakes and tsunamis powerful enough to impact the North American and European coastlines.
The weight of the ice sheet is reduced from the loss of ice from melting and the calving of tidal glaciers, which impacts the earth’s crust, unleashing intense seismic activity.
Calving glaciers is already causing tsunamis in Greenland. But, they are localized and not a regional threat.
So warns Bill McQuire, currently a Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at the University College of London.
The original article is in the Financial Times, which requires I yield up some cash, so I shan’t quote them; the above, with more, is from Pakalolo on Daily Kos here.
While the balances are hardly delicate, overwhelming them could have a price we’ll regret.
