Thawing out biohazards...

[epiphyte]

According to a disturbing story in the Guardian today, thousands of reindeer and at least one person have died in an anthrax outbreak in northern Russia, believed to have been triggered by the unusually warm weather causing the release of the bacteria:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/01/anthrax-outbreak-climate-change-arctic-circle-russia

While this is upsetting, it is not of itself existential - Anthrax is a known threat from the recent past, and as such we have ways to deal with it. But it does open up a broader question... Does the thawing permafrost harbor dormant pathogens to which humanity has not been exposed in recorded history?

At first sight it seems highly plausible that this might be the case. Thoughts?

[Sigmetnow]

Not only pathogens.  Discarded chemical and radioactive waste, thought to be preserved forever under layers of ice and snow.  This time, it is in Greenland:

Melting Ice Will Release Toxic Waste From a Cold War-Era Test Site

During the Cold War, the US Army studied the feasibility of launching ballistic missiles from within Greenland’s ice sheet. When the project was done, engineers buried biological, chemical, and radioactive waste in the ice thinking it would be preserved for eternity. Shame they didn’t know about global warming.

Called Camp Century, the facility was built by the US Army of Engineers in 1959, and it doubled as a top-secret site to see if it was possible to deploy nukes from the Arctic. Known as “the city under ice,” the subterranean base was built 125 miles (220 km) inland from the Greenland coast. It housed 85 to 200 soldiers and scientists, and even included a portable nuclear reactor.

After it was decommissioned in 1969, the Army left virtually everything behind. They figured, not unreasonably, that steadily accumulating snowfall would preserve Camp Century and its contents for centuries, if not longer. A new study published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests this was an imprudent decision, and that the abandoned waste left at the site is now at risk of leaching into the environment. The reason, needless to say, has to do with rising global temperatures and the inexorable melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

http://gizmodo.com/melting-ice-will-release-toxic-waste-from-a-cold-war-er-1784828835

[Sigmetnow]

This article is from 2008.

Climate Threat: Thawing Tundra Releases Infected Corpses

Bodies frozen in the north could be even more fertile ground as a reservoir of the virus. Smallpox is resilient when frozen. Louise Parker and James Martel of the Army Corps of Engineers reported that vaccinia, the virus used in the smallpox vaccine, survives short-term freezing and thawing as well as storage at low temperatures. And in the 1950s, U.S. Army scientists found that the variola survived three years of freezing, particularly at very low temperatures.

In the 1980s, a mass grave near Pokhodsk, Siberia, was exposed by a river and local residents demanded testing of the bodies. Researchers took all the necessary precautions of an epidemic: protective gear, antiseptic cleansing and vaccinations. But even though some bodies were well preserved after a hundred years in permafrost, “viable smallpox virus was not detected, but the virus antigen was discovered,” says Sergei Davidov, currently the assistant director of the field station in Cherskii.

http://www.livescience.com/2403-climate-threat-thawing-tundra-releases-infected-corpses.html