The Reindeer You Don’t Want to See

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote in a blog for Stormwater magazine about a website that’s predicting how many homes will end up underwater as sea levels rise over the next century. Even if that particular worry isn’t high on your list, here’s another climate-related incident that might give you pause.

In western Siberia, higher-than-normal temperatures recently melted a decades-old layer of permafrost, exposing the carcass of a reindeer. That reindeer had been infected with anthrax, and the disease—which hasn’t been seen in the region since 1941—now appears to be spreading. Nine people have been infected and one of them, a 12-year-old boy, has died. About 2,000 reindeer have also died of the disease; the carcasses are being burned, and still-healthy reindeer in the area are receiving vaccinations. As many as a hundred more people who might have been exposed—this is a place, after all, where herding reindeer is a primary occupation—have been evacuated and are being tested for anthrax.

Scientists have speculated, and science fiction authors have written, about the possibility of unleashing a deadly epidemic by tampering with the long-frozen bodies of humans or animals: smallpox, for example, or a particularly virulent form of influenza. This article from Nature gives an interesting account of how long a virus or bacterium might survive under various conditions. It points out that any earth-disturbing activity—construction or drilling, say—might potentially uncover something, but disrupting a frozen site, or a layer of permafrost, is more likely to yield a viable pathogen.

The part of Siberia where the anthrax outbreak is occurring is above the Arctic Circle and typically has winters lasting as long as eight months, with temperatures dipping as low as -90 degrees Fahrenheit. This summer has been about 10 degrees warmer than usual, and the heat wave that melted the permafrost brought temperatures up to 95°F.

For another perspective on the effects of warming on Arctic regions, see this article from the Washington Post titled “Thanks to Climate Change, the Arctic Is Turning Green.” NASA is using satellites to document the increase in plant growth—the “leaf area index”—in regions that had little or no growth before. The article also cites reports by NOAA and the US Geological Survey suggesting that the increased plant mass, caused by global warming, might actually sequester more carbon and help offset the warming process. “While we are perhaps lucky that CO2 has this effect on plant physiology, in addition to being a greenhouse gas, it is not our ‘get out of jail free’ card when it comes to our ongoing emissions of CO2,” one scientist warns.