It started about a decade ago when I read a book on the 1918 Spanish Flu, during which the worst month in Oct 1918 almost 200,000 died in America. Thousands dead in every major American city and 30 to 50 million people across the globe died. . We have sort of expunged that epidemic from our collective memory. But it was a small section of the book that caught my attention in relation to the topic at hand… arctic warming and melting permafrost.
In 1951a team of scientists went to the little village of Brevig Mission in Alaska and dug up the numerous bodies in a mass grave of Inuit people (85% of the village died from the Spanish flu) that has been buried a couple meters down in the permafrost. There was both military and scientific interest in this most deadly virus. They weren't successful in recovering a live virus and ended up throwing out the samples. Fifty years later in 2005 scientists returned and completed the project and were able to sequence the viral RNA. I won't go all CT and talk about weaponizing the H1N1 virus but point out that we need to know all we can about the various flu viruses. I mostly get my annual flu shots.
So what is happening up there in the arctic? Well reading the several diaries here at Daily Kos and elsewhere its pretty clear...its melting and dramatically so. Here a little snip it from USA Today.
“Global warming is slowly thawing out a once top-secret subterranean U.S. nuclear base in northern Greenland, potentially exposing the environment to radioactive coolant, PCBs, and raw sewage that the military originally believed would stay entombed for millennia.”
Here is another one from last week from the Washington Post
“In one of the more unusual symptoms of unseasonable warmth, long-dormant bacteria appear to be active. For the first time since 1941, anthrax struck western Siberia. Thirteen Yamal nomads were hospitalized, including four children, the Siberian Times reported. The bacteria took an even worse toll on wildlife, claiming some 1,500 reindeer since Sunday.”
There are apparently hundreds mass graves of anthrax infected reindeer and cattle corpses buried in the permafrost from an outbreak 75 years ago.
Its not just methane bubbling to the surface and Mammoth tusks that are thawing and being exposed. Permafrost is hard, hard, hard when you are talking about grave digging. A lot of burials are shallow and so whenever a human corpse turns up they are now checking for Small pox scabs and sores on the bodies.
Well there is much more to be written here but i won't be labor the point. Us carbon burning humans are causing more trouble than we realize. We are lifting the lid on the millennia old ice chest. What will we find is going to shock us. I hope you might find this a slight diversion from the politics of the day if somewhat dystopian. Cheers.