They found ‘millennium’ viruses in the Tibetan glacier – El Financiero

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They found ‘millennium’ viruses in the Tibetan glacier – El Financiero

A group of specialists analyzed a series of 28 virus Approximately 15 thousand years ago, which was found in ice samples from Tibetan plateau in China.

According to the study published in the Official Gazette, the viruses are not like any other viruses that have been indexed so far magazine microbiome.

These viruses lived nearly 14,400 years because they were frozen, preserved as spores in glacial ice.


Virtually nothing is known about the archived ancient glacial ice genomes or viral communities, which May be active on icy surfaces before freezing tens of thousands of years ago,” the study details.

The team took two ice cores from a layer Julia, at the western end of Kunlun, a long Asian mountain range. This happened in 2015. The samples were analyzed by specialists from Ohio State University’s Bird Polar and Climate Research Center, in collaboration with the Tibetan Plateau Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Microbiologist Zhiping Zhong, lead author of the study, said that after splitting the collected ice, 33 viruses were found, at least 28 of which were previously unknown to science. CNN.

The scientists also told the outlet that the viruses may have originated in the soil or plants in the area, not in humans or animals.


Specialists determined, according to the document, that glaciers likely archive viruses due to their climatic conditions for tens of hundreds of thousands of years. However, they face melting.

“Unfortunately, glaciers around the world, including those on the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas, are rapidly shrinking, mainly due to anthropogenic warming of the Earth’s ocean and atmosphere system. Such melting Not only will you lose those old, archived microbes and viruses, But It will also release them into the environment in the future‘, they concluded.

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