Ancient viruses preserved in glacial ice hold valuable information about changes in Earth’s climate, a new study suggests.
Ancient viruses preserved in glacial ice hold valuable information about changes in Earth’s climate, a new study suggests.
For decades, the Guliya Glacier, located above 20,000 feet in the far northwestern Tibetan Plateau, has been one of the richest archives available to scientists to investigate large-scale paleoclimate shifts. Now, by analyzing recovered ice core samples from the glacier, microbiologists have reconstructed pieces of virus DNA that were left within them and identified nearly 1,700 viral species, of which about three-fourths are newly discovered.
Drilling into prehistoric ice doesn’t have health implications for modern humans, because these long-dormant viruses likely infected other dominant microbes rather than animals or humans, but researchers found that their adaptations significantly influenced their hosts’ ability to survive in extreme conditions during variations in Earth’s climate cycles.
Read More: Ohio State University
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