Possibility of another outbreak

In 2012, an article named 'Bugs in the Ice Sheet' was published in 'Scientific American', an American science magazine, which stated that ancient life forms like microbes and bacteria that lived long before humans walked the planet are housed within the ice sheets of Antarctica and may come out as an impact of global warming. The article also said that the ice sheets of Antarctica house an entire lost world of ancient creatures that may have been trapped in there, biding their time until conditions change and set them free. Now with the ice melting at an alarming rate it would be better to assume that those conditions could soon be at hand and masses of bacteria and other microbes, some of which the world hasn't seen since the middle Pleistocene, which existed about 750,000 years ago will make their way into the environment and this might be a bigger challenge for us than the present situation of COVOD-19 as these gigantic ice sheets are a reservoir of millions and trillions of ancient microbes some of which are completely unknown to mankind. Researchers also predict that if these microbes and bacteria somehow manage their way onto our world again then this might lead to a situation worse than anything we could ever anticipate.

Even looking at the present situation where the world is already battling a pandemic on one hand with the pressure of global warming on the other. Can it be said that this is just the beginning of the worst to come as the impacts of global warming can mostly be seen in the polar regions, with heat tapping greenhouse gases warming the polar regions much faster than the rest of the planet today, opening the possibility of return of things that once went extinct and leading to another global emergency.

Dibyojyoti Brahma,

Cotton University