A remote community in Siberia suffered a mysterious outbreak in December 2016. Around 90 people were infected and a 12-year-old boy was killed. Eventually, Russian officials discovered what killed him: Anthrax, a lethal infectious disease. The outbreak initially broke out among the reindeer population. More than 2,000 reindeer carcasses were burned to control the outbreak. The bizarre thing was that there had been no epidemic of anthrax in the region for more than 70 years. And, to find out where it came from, the scientists were starting to look underground.
There is a layer of Earth in the coldest parts of the world that remains frozen all year round. The soil above it thaws every summer, but this deeper layer remains as hard as a rock. It’s called permafrost. Some permafrost is in the Arctic, in the Northern Hemisphere. And because it never thaws, permafrost works like a freezer in your refrigerator’s freezing compartment. If plants and animals die here, they don’t fully decompose. Instead, they are held in the frozen world, like a time capsule. And this has been the way for thousands of years. But this is evolving.
Humans are now consuming oil more than ever and making the atmosphere hotter day by day. And that allows the permafrost to thaw and shrink considerably. Only a few regions will have some permafrost left by 2100. And that is causing a few problems. As permafrost disappears, the ground above it becomes unstable, which may lead to landslides. Man-made structures begin to fall apart, as the ground beneath them collapses. Also, the dead plants and animals that have been frozen for years are beginning to thaw too. As they are exposed to air and bacteria, this organic material begins to decompose. It releases greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide and methane. But this isn’t all it releases back into the environment. In Siberia, scientists believe that the outbreak of anthrax was caused by a long-dead reindeer carcass that thawed along with the permafrost. Anthrax spores would have dispersed throughout the area and affected reindeer grazing nearby. And that is not anthrax alone. Scientists fear that, when permafrost melts, all kinds of pathogens that we assumed we had under control could remerge and cause havoc.
There are 35 million people living around areas that are permanently frozen. As carbon released, because of the melting of the permafrost, will aggravate climate change impacts everywhere: rising oceans, heat waves, droughts in some areas, and floods in others. And now we can add one more thing to that list, the diseases that we thought we had overcome.