Nearly 1,700 ancient viruses spanning 41,000 years found in Himalayas

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The Himalayas are hiding nearly 1,700 ancient virus species, a new study has found. According to a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, around three-quarters of these viruses were previously unknown to science. 

Scientists studied the scraps of viral DNA frozen in ice cores of the Guliya Glacier on the Tibetan Plateau which sits nearly four miles above sea level. They now hope to understand how viruses adapt to changes in climate and how the current viruses might change in the coming years.

The discovery was made in 2015 and the results were published recently. 

"Before this work, how viruses linked to large-scale changes in Earth's climate had remained largely uninvestigated," study co-author ZhiPing Zhong, said in a statement. "Glacial ice is so precious, and we often don't have the large amounts of material required for virus and microbe research."

Zhong is a research associate at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University. 

Climate change is threatening to destroy the information stored within permafrost as the ice melts because of rising temperatures. Glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, and some of them in the Himalayas, the Alps, and the Andes have already lost a lot of ice.

"Three of the ice cores in our collection come from glaciers that no longer exist in the real world,"  Lonnie Thompson, a paleoclimatologist and glaciologist at Ohio State University, said. 

"Our mountain-top glaciers and the history they contain are disappearing at an accelerating rate as global temperatures continue to rise."

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So scientists are hoping to dig out whatever they can as soon as possible before they are lost to the changing climate.

Discovering the story of last 41,000 years

The paper says that the viruses found are from "nine time horizons, spanning three cold-to-warm cycles over the past 41,000  years."

This is not the first time that viruses frozen in permafrost have been unearthed. Scientists fear that one of these ancient viruses might infect humans and more glaciers melt. 

According to the paper, the finding reveals how ancient viruses adapted to changes in climate and how they evolved over thousands of years. One of the viruses found comes from ice cores dating around 11,500 years ago. At this time in history, the cold of the Last Glacial Stage was shifting to the warmer Holocene epoch, our current time. 

Scientists also believe that several of these viruses might have come from other areas since at least a quarter of them overlap with species found elsewhere.

"That means some of them were potentially transported from areas like the Middle East or even the Arctic," said Zhong.