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Researchers recently discovered around 1,700 ancient viruses, most of which are completely unknown to science, hidden within a glacier in the Himalayas.
As they explain in their report published in the journal Nature Geoscience, “Glaciers archive time-structured information on climates and ecosystems, including microorganisms.”
And in this case, the Guliya Glacier on the Tibetan Plateau yielded more than 1,700 virus species in a 1,000-foot ice core sample which dates back 41,000 years.
“Before this work, how viruses linked to large-scale changes in Earth’s climate had remained largely uninvestigated,“ said ZhiPing Zhong, lead author of the study and a research associate at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State University. “Glacial ice is so precious, and we often don’t have the large amounts of material required for virus and microbe research.”
The scientists also discovered that while most of the viruses found in the glacier were unique to that region, about one-fourth of them overlapped with known organisms from other areas of the world.
“That means some of them were potentially transported from areas like the Middle East or even the Arctic,” said Zhong.
Many of these same researchers had already discovered dozens of other previously unknown viruses in 2021 in ice samples excavated from the Tibetan Plateau in 2015.
The researchers report that three-fourths of the viruses they found in the Guliya Glacier are also newly discovered, but they claim they are no threat to humans.
“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,” the researchers said in a statement.
That, however, doesn’t mean that viruses that are revealed by thawing ice in the future couldn’t present a global health risk.
For instance, in January 2024, scientists in France issued a warning in which they claimed a “zombie virus” that has been frozen for over 30,000 years in Siberia could cause another pandemic.