Arctic ice and permafrost are melting, exposing microbes long thought dormant. In 2016, a heatwave in northern Siberia exposed a reindeer carcass in the permafrost riddled with anthrax bacteria. Exposure to the carcass led to the death of a 12-year-old boy, the infection of at least seven other people, and the infection and death of thousands of reindeer. The previous reported case of anthrax in the area, locally called the “Siberian plague,” was in 1941. Scientists have been discovering ancient frozen viruses since 2003. The recent discovery of a 30,000-year-old giant virus—a virus visible under a microscope—does not alarm scientists of potential human infection, but some do worry that it is only a matter of time before ancient viruses pose a significant threat. This is especially true with the potential of viral spillover in the Arctic, for studies of soil and sediments from Lake Hazen, the high Arctic’s largest freshwater lake, suggest that the potential for viruses to affect new hosts for the first time might be greater the closer a potential host is to melting glaciers. The re-emerging viruses accompany the spread of new and existing zoonotic diseases resulting from environmental changes, including vector-borne diseases like tick-borne encephalitis. The next viral pandemic is all but a foregone conclusion, but scientists are investigating not only the location—from the tropics or the arctic—but also the time: from when will the virus emerge, the frozen past or the not-yet-mutated future?
This project fundamentally asks: how are people thinking about this potentially apocalyptic destruction and risk? More specifically, this project probes how scientists approach and narrativize the intersection of climate change, pandemics, and human (and nonhuman) history; how this might compare to popular discourse and public narratives on climate change and pandemics; and how people live with the potential fear over emerging and re-emerging viruses amidst melting ice in the Arctic. In other words, how are the risks and fears surrounding future pandemics brought on by climate change narrativized and navigated in popular discourse, and what role do arctic scientists play in those practices of narrativization and navigation?
In addition to the more general topics of risk and fear around pandemics and climate change, this project will also specifically query the temporal relationship between new and old viruses. The ancientness of viruses trapped in ice and permafrost re-emerging collides with the newness of emerging zoonotic diseases—both a result of human-caused climate change as ice melts and animals migrate—and such collision narrates a unique story of human/nonhuman interaction, past and future pandemics, and time itself. When a virus can be tens of thousands of years old and encounter present-day humans and nonhumans, I hypothesize that a new understanding of time can be crafted to account for this reanimation of the seemingly dead. In other words, varying planetary temporalities intersect because of anthropocentric environmental degradation and climate change. From a planetary perspective, are these viruses really “past,” and what effect do they have on the present alongside the broader implication that pastness here is enlivened—or, for those microbiologists who claim that viruses are not alive, reanimated—in the present and propelled into the future.
