Pestilence: Another Consequence of Losing the Cryosphere and the Permafrost

The Corona 19 virus has had an unprecedented effect on our complex, interlinked global economy. It is merely a forewarning of what we have unleashed as the cryosphere and the permafrost melts.
“For the past 15,000 years, a glacier on the north-western Tibetan Plateau of China has hosted a party for some unusual guests: an ensemble of frozen viruses, many of them unknown to modern science.”

“Scientists recently broke up this party after taking a look at two ice cores from this Tibetan glacier, revealing the existence of 28 never-before-seen virus groups.” Only two ice cores uncovered 28 new viruses.

Investigating these mysterious viruses could help scientists on two fronts: For one, these stowaways can teach researchers which viruses thrived in different climates and environments over time, the researchers wrote in a paper posted on the bioRxiv database on Jan. 7. Ancient never-before-seen viruses discovered locked up in Tibetan glacier

From an article in Popular Mechanix titled “Welp, Scientists Found 28 New Virus Groups in a Melting Glacier

  • “Scientists have unearthed 28 previously undiscovered viruses, which were trapped in glacial ice from 15,000 years ago.
  • The team collected the samples from the Guliya ice cap in Tibet, and published their work to the pre-print website, BioRxiv.
  • As glacial ice and permafrost around the world continues to thaw, scientists are concerned that ancient pathogens and toxic chemicals may be released into the environment.”

“When reindeer started dying in Siberia, at first scientists blamed the heat. But there seems to be a more insidious cause: Anthrax.”
“After an investigation, scientists have determined that the culprit is anthrax, which hasn’t been seen in the country since 1968. Scientists believe the source of the anthrax is an old reindeer carcass that was frozen during the last anthrax epidemic 75 years ago. The current heatwave thawed the carcass, allowing the dormant bacteria to spread.” Thawed Reindeer Corpse May Have Triggered Russian Anthrax Outbreak

“Mammoth bones are surfacing in the Russian Far East — so many that people have begun selling the tusks as a substitute for elephant ivory. And in 2016, more than 70 people in western Siberia were hospitalized for exposure to anthrax, likely spread from a decades-old reindeer carcass that thawed from frozen ground.”
Thawing Permafrost: “25% of the Northern Hemisphere is permafrost”

Ignorance is our enemy

“In my darkest moments, I see a really horrible future for Homo sapiens because we are an animal, and when we extend our borders things will happen to us,” said Birgitta Evengard, a researcher in clinical microbiology at Umea University in Sweden.”
“Our biggest enemy is our own ignorance,” she added. “Nature is full of microorganisms.”
“Microorganisms can survive in frozen space for a long, long time,” said Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

Climate change may bring back viruses that were long thought to be dormant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q39M-CkbBTY
“There is zero guarantee that this set of living arrangements will hold together much longer considering the threats we know it is under with the next ‘Black Swan’ hovering in the wings about to appear.” This is the End, Beautiful Friends, The End

So much to look forward to, so little time. Brace for imminent impact. These are the ‘Good Old Days’, they certainly aren’t going to get better. Every single last analogue is heading in the wrong direction, and our predicament can only be worse than we know.
“The Path of Increase is Slow but the Road to Ruin is Swift” Lucius Seneca
Seneca








Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Dylan Thomas.
The accompanying peer reviewed paper and source article from the BBC article Professor McPherson quotes below can be found at Guy’s Substack post titled: Science Snippets: Climate Change Drives Increased Arsenic in Rice
Climate Change Facilitates Spread of Deadly Fungus.
“Anthropogenic climate change has several consequences. Many of these consequences are negative. Now that Earth is amid the most rapid climate change in planetary history, and also bearing in mind that this rapid change is irreversible, additional outcomes are beginning to appear. It’s not only the heat and the rapid loss of habitat for a variety of species. It’s every imaginable outcome, and some that I couldn’t imagine.”
Climate Change Facilitates Spread of Deadly Fungus

Unknown's avatar

I'm an anti-imperialist, environmental activist and blue ocean sailor, who is passionate about the earth and all it's inhabitants without favour. Brace for imminent impact as we bare witness to the non-linear unraveling of the biosphere and habitability disappearing for most if not all complex life on the only habitable planet we know of. To quote President Niinistö in North Russia: ‘If We Lose the Arctic, We Lose the World’. Folks we have lost the Arctic.

Posted in Arctic, permafrost, Pestilence, Viruses
184 comments on “Pestilence: Another Consequence of Losing the Cryosphere and the Permafrost
  1. sealintheselkirks's avatar sealintheselkirks says:

    Here it comes. Bird Flu has now officially gone airborne:

    Bird Flu Mutates as Trump Guts Biological Security & Vaccine Funding

    __
    Went down to the city yesterday to pick up the ‘Expanded and Revised Edition’ of my book (encompasses the last 5 Covid years) from the printer, and ended up in a couple stores with a very short shopping list. And I did actually see other people in masks…but only a few of course.

    4th leading cause of death in the US right now by the way is Covid.
    ___
    sealintheSelkirks

    Like

  2. sealintheselkirks's avatar sealintheselkirks says:

    This one came up on Friday:

    Factory Farms and the Next Pandemic: How Industrial Animal Agriculture Fuels Global Health Threats

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/13/factory-farms-and-the-next-pandemic/

    __

    Probably had some of this going in that Zoom meeting I bet!

    sealintheSelkirks

    Like

  3. sealintheselkirks's avatar sealintheselkirks says:

    And funny little diseases keep popping up here and there that nobody has ever heard of…

    Babesiosis in Massachusetts: Symptoms, risks, treatment explained

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6Z32zDnw8Q

    __

    Urgent Tick Bite Warning Issued For Summer 2025

    https://weather.com/health/video/july-tick-danger-northeast-at-risk

    __

    I’ve picked a lot of ticks off the dogs this summer, and even one off the cat…but so far none off of me.

    sealintheSelkirks

    Liked by 1 person

  4. sealintheselkirks's avatar sealintheselkirks says:

    You may or may not believe this shit:

    “Promoting Health Freedom?” Let people make their own ‘informed’ heath decisions based on their own research and ‘values.’

    Key word: Values, because we know that the majority of the Christo-Fascists have no idea how to actually conduct ‘research.’

    Florida is going for complete elimination of childhood Vaccine Mandates before they can go to school. Which of course will “empower” people to…watch their children die of childhood diseases? Soon all kids in Florida can go to school to learn what it was like to catch Polio…

    A state that is having a surge of Zitka Virus, Malaria, and a number of others needs this?

    But wait, vaccines are somehow “Immoral?”

    https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_Uyxp2fYfTA?feature=share

    __

    But since schools are being financially crushed by the Orange Menace I guess it doesn’t matter because parents who can’t afford private schools can have their kids go to work in the states that has changed the laws to get 14 yr olds into slaughterhouses etc etc. Working instead of being educated is so much better! MAGATS will love this!

    So who was it that came up with the motto that was put over a gate last century “Work Will Make You Free?” It was in German….

    Maybe a new motto could be ‘Freedom to catch Smallpox.’

    sealintheSelkirks

    Liked by 1 person

  5. sealintheselkirks's avatar sealintheselkirks says:

    New outbreak of Avian across England:

    Public alerted after bird flu outbreak

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm277kpvy5do?utm_

    __

    In the US, we hear NOTHING about anything except what the Fascists want us to hear. Voices are being silenced everywhere, and media corporations are cowed into submission while paying millions in bribes to DJT to be (for now) left alone in phony lawsuits that they would win if they only had the cojones to fight the regime. They don’t of course, along with so many of them being owned by rightwing billionaires anyway who have hitched their wagon to the Fascists for more power and profit.

    The worst parts of Brave New World are combining with 1984. And maybe a bit of ‘It Can’t Happen Here.’

    It is mindboggling how utterly incompetent these people are. But that’s a model of government now being institutionalized at this very moment. Not even a year yet of this regime, and this country is 1935 Germany. But it always has been authoritarian since the founding. Can’t have a country that refuses to acknowledge it started with genocide and slavery ever truly balance itself.

    I guess bloodthirsty, outwardly psychotic, pathological liars being in control is the new normal? Or was it always this way but better hidden?

    __

    Nothing about bird flu here, nothing much about Covid since the beginning of the Fascist takeover when it was last let out of a university lab that the US still has over 300 a week dying of that new disease. Those sources have dried up now at Month 10 of the Coup.

    With scientists and doctors being exited from public health, research labs closed up, vaccine funding cut to the bone, the childhood diseases here are on the rise especially with Brainworm Bob at the controls. Somewhere down the line a pathogen is going to mutate and this country is going to be totally fucked.

    We’ll all be locked in our houses starving or evicted for non-payment of property taxes and on the street or in the new homeless concentration camps like the one being built in Utah right now, trying to not catch whatever it is that is killing our neighbors.

    Then whatever it is will spread across the world very very quickly due to air travel. The Covid shots are now NOT ALLOWED to be given except to the very old…and schools are being forced to allow dumbass fucking parents to ‘make their choice’ to NOT vaccinate their kids entering school due to ‘religious’ beliefs.

    Because Jesus will protect you IF you pray hard enough, yes?

    The stupid are in control, dude, and this country is going to face an absolutely horrifying result I’m afraid.

    My warning to the world is to put the US in quarantine. Read this article and be warned:

    At The Hollow in Florida, the ‘Medical Freedom’ Movement Finds Its Base Camp

    https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/florida-the-hollow-ladapo-vaccines-medical-freedom-conspiracy-theories/?utm_

    sealintheSelkirks

    Like

  6. sealintheselkirks's avatar sealintheselkirks says:

    This is a little blip that came out of the censorship imposed by the corporate news media

    Washington resident infected with different strain of bird flu, health officials say

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/washington-bird-flu-h5n5-strain-infection/?utm

    A Washington resident has been hospitalized with a different strain of bird flu than those seen in past cases, state health officials announced Friday.

    The person was infected with a bird flu called H5N5. State and federal health officials say it appears to be the first known human infection with the H5N5 bird flu virus.

    __

    I do not think this is a good mutation in Avian Flu, but it’s the first public notice in months about Avian I’ve seen.

    sealintheSelkirks

    Liked by 1 person

  7. sealintheselkirks's avatar sealintheselkirks says:

    The absolute dumbest population of any 1st world country., And most definitely sucked deep into the Deep South slave states. Just boneheaded ignorance on par with the old school language of mental retardation. In other words, these people are effing retarded!

    https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/measles-outbreak-south-carolina-vaccine-misinformation-kennedy-rfk/?utm_

    __

    But then there is the moron in chief’s little dimwit ex-heroin junkie rich guy spewing his stupidity that is soaked up by these idiots into whatever is left of their brains after they had repeated bouts of Covid these last five years.

    Which, by the way, is still killing people in this country but it’s really hard to find any damned numbers because nobody has the funding to keep track. And too many scientists have been fired that would have been keeping track.

    sealintheSelkirks

    Liked by 1 person

  8. sealintheselkirks's avatar sealintheselkirks says:

    Appointment of controversial FDA official rocking agency like “an atom bomb,” scientists there say

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-tracy-beth-hoeg-controversy/?utm_

    __

    And the fall off the cliff this country is experiencing in just about every category continues unabated… Collapse mirrors the collapse of the climate

    sealintheSelkirks

    Like

  9. sealintheselkirks's avatar sealintheselkirks says:

    Whooping cough is now spreading across the US. Not to be dismissive but I hope it’s all MAGA children who are dying because the rest of us don’t deserve it. Neither do MAGA children but it’s the ideology they were born into…

    Trump SCREWS UP BAD as DISEASE SPREADS

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tofl0_X218U

    __

    sealintheSelkirks

    Like

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Kevin Hester

Kevin Hester is currently living on Rakino Island, a small island in the Hauraki Gulf near Auckland, New Zealand, monitoring the unravelling of the biosphere and volunteering at the Rakino Island Nursery is currently developing a proposal to create a marine reserve near by. The Island has no grid tied electricity or reticulated water.  I catch my own water from the roof and generate my electricity from the ample solar radiation on the island.

My Submission to the Ministry of the Environment
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