Return of a Virus
A plant virus frozen in northern ice for centuries has been reconstructed and shown to be infective. As climate warming melts the ice in the North, biological history is being released. Dr. Brian Moorman, a Professor of Geography at the University of Calgary, and his colleagues, revived a virus extracted from caribou feces, frozen in a 700-year-old ice patch in the Selwyn mountains of the Northwest Territories. The virus is a type that infects plants, though not the same as any virus known today and despite centuries of deep freeze, was able to infect modern plants in lab experiments. Dr. Moorman thinks that as ice patches, glaciers and permafrost melt in the North, we may see what he calls "an invasive species from another time" - the reintroduction of long dead or dormant microbes.
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