First, there was this 15,000-year-old virus, and now a 48,500-year-old zombie virus has been discovered frozen in Siberia’s permafrost. Several samples were collected, but the oldest one was discovered from a sample of Earth taken from an underground lake 52-feet beneath the surface. On the other hand, the youngest samples were found in the stomach contents a 27,000-year-old woolly mammoth’s remains.
Before you worry about a cataclysmic virus outbreak, this one can only infect amoebas rather than plants or animals. There’s no doubt that some viruses sealed in permafrost that could infect animal cells, possibly even humans, but that is a scenario scientists want to prepare for as Earth warms and frozen soil starts thawing around the world.
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We view these amoeba-infecting viruses as surrogates for all other possible viruses that might be in the permafrost, We see the traces of many, many, many other viruses. So we know they are there. We don’t know for sure that they are still alive. But our reasoning is that if the amoeba viruses are still alive, there is no reason why the other viruses will not be still alive, and capable of infecting their own hosts,” said Jean-Michel Claverie, an Emeritus professor of medicine and genomics at the Aix-Marseille University School of Medicine to CNN.
