Anthrax, smallpox and poisoning - 3 terrifying effects of global warming

The Siberian anthrax outbreak

While climate change skeptics continue to deny the obvious reality unfolding before them, the world continues to experience record high temperatures. This July was the hottest month since we started properly keeping track of temperatures in 1880.

In fact, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), July was the fifteenth straight month in which global heat records were broken. This streak is a record all on its own, though probably not one we should be celebrating.

This warming has not spared even the world's most frigid regions. And, in Siberia, the world's coldest inhabited place, we found out exactly what can happen when a region's natural climate changes.

This summer has been particularly brutal in Siberia with temperatures in some regions over 10 degrees above normal. The result was that the permafrost started to thaw, revealing things long since buried. Among the permafrost's secrets was organic matter.

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Some of this organic matter, more specifically a 7-decade-old reindeer carcass, contained long dormant spores of anthrax. Within a week, one boy had succumbed to anthrax. At least 90 people are confirmed to be infected. Over 2,300 reindeer have died. The region is now under quarantine.

But the outbreak poses a bigger question - what other threats are lurking, buried in ice but just waiting to be freed by man-made climate change?

A looming smallpox threat

Anthrax is a disease caused by a bacteria. While high temperatures are enough to kill most bacteria and destroy viruses, low temperatures do not. The anthrax-causing bacteria, for example, doesn't die when frozen. Instead, it forms spores that can lay dormant, evidently for decades, coming back to life when exposed to more favourable conditions.

But this bacteria is not the only pathogen that can do this. Viruses could also potentially survive these frigid conditions. The worry now is that centuries-old graveyards filled with victims of smallpox, graveyards previously covered in permafrost, could now also be exposed. Considering the current anthrax outbreak is believed to stem from shallow grave sites dug for reindeer that died of an anthrax outbreak, the reemergence of smallpox is not unimaginable.

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Already, Russian scientists have visited previously frozen grave sites of smallpox victims. While they haven't found the virus itself, they have found DNA fragments of it.

But graves, if deep enough, will still hold these diseases at bay. The problem though is when victims of deadly diseases do not end up buried. The nomads of Siberia, for example, place their dead in coffins on exposed hillsides. These are eventually covered by the ice, seemingly lost forever. Until a heatwave like the current one exposes them, potentially freeing bacteria and viruses.

The devil you don't know

While the devils we know are scary enough, the devils we don't are even more terrifying. More than just the diseases we know that could be lurking in the frost, are the ones we don't have a clue about.

Recently, scientists discovered a giant virus preserved in ice that remained infectious even after 30,000 years. While the virus wasn't capable of infecting humans, it readily infected amoebae. This virus was found in Siberia, just in case you were starting to feel a sense of complacency or security.

Scientists speculate that other viruses, potentially older and more threatening to mankind, could be lurking deeper within the permafrost. These are all viruses that we do not know a thing about, meaning that in an outbreak, we wouldn't have a clue how to combat, or even diagnose them in the initial stages.

While the current level of global warming may not thaw the permafrost enough to release these, drilling and mining in these frozen regions could one day release a virus that could wipe out thousands.

Mercury rising

Now, while pathogens give us a new climate change fear to worry about, the more conventional effects like melting ice sheets are also a major problem. Not just in the long term as we've been lead to believe either, but right now.

"Together with other toxic pollutants mercury tends to accumulate in both the Arctic and Antarctic. When the sea ice melts, there is good reason to suspect that a lot of toxins currently frozen in the sea ice will be released," said Katarina Gårdfeldt, the expedition's research director.

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As this mercury enters the water, it immediately becomes part of the food chain, affecting organisms as small as plankton and as large as whales. As it travels up the food chain, the mercury only gets more concentrated and deadly, eventually making its way back to the human body through our food. In humans, it is an almost lethal neurotoxin.

What's ironic is that the mercury found in the Arctic makes its way there largely as suspended air particles. Caused as the by-products of coal powerplants and gold mining, they can remain suspended in the atmosphere for long periods of time, affecting nothing and no one. This mercury however, oxidises on contact with bromine, causing it to get heavier and drop out of the atmosphere. What is the cause of this bromine? Melting sea ice.