Posted by Cockney Robin |
Before I get started, let me just say that this article raises an alarming question about the effects of global warming which it answers almost immediately by explaining that probably we don't need to be too fussed.
But I prefer to worry. If I have enough different things to worry about it all at the same time, all my individual worries seem comparatively less urgent. Perhaps the human mind is so constituted that it can only panic about one threat---or for the multi-taskers, at most three---at a time. Or maybe it's just me. If you look at all the things threatening your/our/humankind's dominance hold on life and dominance over nature, you start developing a certain detachment or at least a certain tolerance for different sorts and kinds of threat. One day, terrorists; another day, avian flu; now, ancient microbes released from deep in the ice by global warming.
Speaking of which, according to this story, scientists have unfrozen some extremely old and nasty ice from glaciers. Ancient microbes 'revived' in lab (BBC News). The ice ranged in age from 100,000 years to 8 milliion years. It contained microbes, some evidently new to science. And when the ice melted (under laboratory conditions), some of the microbes came back to life (BBC News). Showing that if climate change occurs, and the ice caps melt, "ancient bugs, long frozen in ice, will return to life as climate change causes the glaciers to melt, flushing their genetic material into the oceans."(BBC News).
The really old microbes from the 8 million year old ice grew really slowly, suggesting that their DNA had been damaged (BBC News). "This suggested some microorganisms in this old ice were alive, but only just. Their DNA had been severely damaged by long exposure to cosmic radiation. This radiation is stronger at the poles, where the Earth's protective magnetic field is weakest." (BBC News).
But some of the DNA extracted from the ice was completely new to science.
In the younger samples, the team found evidence of some of the most common bacteria around today, including the firmicutes, proteobacteria and actinobacteria.
But the team also compared genetic sequences extracted from the ice to known genes of modern bacteria. Curiously, there were few matches, meaning the ancient microbes may have had genes that were new to science.
Dr Bidle and his colleagues describe the glaciers as "gene popsicles" containing DNA that can be acquired by existing organisms when it is thawed (BBC News)..
Ha ha ha! If this were a Steven King novel, those microbes would already have got loose from the lab and begun to unleash a sequence of strange and previously unimagined horrors on humankind.
But this is not a Steven King novel, so you really only need to worry about these microbes if you don't listen to Al Gore. Though even then don't worry too much because scientists say that it is "unlikely" that any of these bugs will cause human diseases"(BBC News). Anyway, this sort of thing is already going on all the time!
"The ice sheets are continually undergoing accumulation, so they are flowing outward and the ice is lost through sublimation or calving into the ocean," explained co-author David Marchant of Boston University, US (BBC News). .
Phew, eh? Though isn't what the scientists in those novels always say?
And what killed the dinosaurs, eh? Tell me that. What killed the dinosaurs? I googled "dinosaurs killed by microbes" and immediately found the following: Global Warming Killed the Dinosaurs (Associated Content; September 2006). Of course this posting (which sounds very scientific to me) doesn't mention ancient microbes, but it does prattle on about sulfur-producing microbes in "anoxic" oceans that release strangling gases into the atmosphere. Close enough!
Ah well, I'm off to get a pint. While I still can.
PS. One thing that the microbes apparently suggest is that the seeds of life on earth are unlikely to have come from sources external to the solar system as some scientists seem to think. I couldn't follow the reasoning, but it had something to do with cosmic radiation. Read the article yourself; you will enjoy it
Do you're saying the ice has weapons of mass destruction?
Posted by: Dyre42 | August 08, 2007 at 01:43 PM