August 27, 2024
Locked in a glacier, viruses adapted to survive extreme weather
Ancient viruses preserved in glacial ice hold valuable information about changes in Earth’s climate, a new study suggests.
For decades, the Guliya Glacier, located above 20,000 feet in the far northwestern Tibetan Plateau, has been one of the richest archives available to scientists to investigate large-scale paleoclimate shifts. Now, by analyzing recovered ice core samples from the glacier, microbiologists have reconstructed pieces of virus DNA that were left within them and identified nearly 1,700 viral species, of which about three-fourths are newly discovered.
