Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. This is the show where we
try to give you that you know, that deep dive
you really need on some of the most complex, surprising,
and well often pretty terrifying subjects.
Speaker 2: We basically take a whole stack of sources, research articles,
and we distill it all.
Speaker 1: Down, we pull out the critical nuggets. The goal is
that by the end of this you are instantly and
thoroughly informed.
Speaker 2: And today we are. We're peering beneath the surface of
the world. Quite literally, we're contrasting that serene image we
all have in.
Speaker 1: Our minds, the postcard image.
Speaker 2: Exactly, the postcard of nature, of quiet wilderness, with the
truly terrifying ancient realities that are stirring right beneath our feet,
and as we'll see some that are melting out from
above our heads.
Speaker 1: That's such a good way to put it. Our subject
matter today really forces you to look beyond that surface
level of environmental beauty. You have to recognize the sheer,
indifferent power of these geological and biological forces.
Speaker 2: Forces that operate on time scales that are just they're
almost impossible for us to comprehend completely.
Speaker 1: And we're starting with an incredibly idyllic picture Yellowstone National Park.
You picture Old Faithful, the bison roaming around the beautiful
caldera rim just this sense of peace. But the sources
we've been digging into, and specifically we're drawing heavily from
the History Channel's fantastic YouTube series it's called The Dangerous
Truth Buried under Yellowstone. It just immediately throws that sense
of peace into profound question.
Speaker 2: Because beneath that stunning landscape, something truly massive is stirring,
and due to modern shifts, that geological clock it's arguably
speeding up.
Speaker 1: So what's our mission today?
Speaker 2: Our mission is to really understand the scope and the
implications of two massive existential threats, threats that have laine
dormant for in some cases millennia, but are now being
reawakened by modern changes.
Speaker 1: And that's the key, right, the reawakening.
Speaker 2: It is chiefly driven by environmental shifts and climate change.
So we have one gigantic geological threat hidden under the
American West and one well one insidious biological threat lock
deep within the Siberian tundra.
Speaker 1: We're uncovering ancient secrets that frankly, we probably hoped would
stay buried and we're using cutting edge science to shine
a light on these low probability of but incredibly high
impact events.
Speaker 3: High impact is putting it mildly right.
Speaker 1: So we have two distinct, but as you'll see, thematically
connected threads to pull on. The very heat that is
subtly changing the ground dynamics in Yellowstone is you could
argue the same global warming mechanism that is melting the
ice in Siberia.
Speaker 3: It's two sides of the same coin exactly.
Speaker 1: So for the first major part of our deep dive,
we'll detail the completely accidental discovery of one of the
world's largest volcanic threats hiding in plain sight.
Speaker 3: And then we pivot.
Speaker 2: We go to the Arctic where extreme heat is melting
the permafrost and releasing this alarming, highly fatal ancient pathogen.
And it's one that poses a unique and totally unpredictable
risk to modern humanity.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's get into it. Let's start with this
this monumental hidden danger. And the story begins in the
mid nineteen sixties, right.
Speaker 2: And it starts with what seemed like a purely technological,
almost logistical exercise. It had nothing to do with discovering
a global castrophe engine. It's just an amazing story of
unintended consequences.
Speaker 1: The starting point for all this geological terror is nineteen
sixty five, and we have to remember the context. This
was the absolute height of the Cold War, the peak
of the space.
Speaker 3: Yeah, everything was about looking up, looking.
Speaker 1: Out exactly, and NASA kicks off this mission with a
really critical, very specific goal. They needed to accurately map
the surface of the Earth from space. They were using
these new, unbelievably state of the art satellite cameras. They
were basically inventing orbital mapping as they went.
Speaker 2: And this is where you know the scientific precision really matters.
To make sure those new satellite images were actually accurate.
To calibrate them, basically, NASA needed a meticulous control set
of pictures, pictures taken on the ground. It's exactly like
verifying a ruler. You need to know your measurements are correct.
They needed specific, easily identifiable, fixed and geographically unique features
to cross reference with what the satellite was seeing from
hundreds of miles.
Speaker 3: Up in orbit.
Speaker 1: So they're looking around for the perfect spot, this perfect
natural laboratory for their new cameras, and their choice for
this baseline map was Yellowstone National Park.
Speaker 2: And that choice was highly deliberate. It was because of
the park's quote ideal geology.
Speaker 1: What does that even mean, ideal geology for taking pictures.
Speaker 2: Well, it's chalk full of geysers and natural pools and
these features, these hydrothermal systems, they serve as excellent, very
distinct testing features for camera accuracy.
Speaker 1: So it's like a built in test pattern on the ground.
Speaker 3: That's a perfect way to put it.
Speaker 2: To get a little more specific, these hydrothermal features are
so valuable because they have unique and crucially relatively fixed
spectral signatures.
Speaker 1: Meaning they look unique from the sky.
Speaker 2: Exactly, the mineral content in the water, the heat they
give off, the steam, even the specific colors of the
microbial maps that grow around the pools. All of that
offers these excellent fixed points of reference. It gives you
a high contrast, repeatable pattern that's just perfect for calibrating
orbital equipment that's designed to spot subtle differences in the ground.
Speaker 1: Okay, so NASA puts a man named Bob Christiansen in
charge of making this baseline map. He's the guy on
the ground setting up the fixed reference points.
Speaker 2: Right, and here's the lucky break. Because Christensen just happened
to be an established professional geologist, the National Park Service
saw an opportunity.
Speaker 1: They piggybacked on the mission.
Speaker 3: They absolutely did.
Speaker 2: They said, hey, while you're out there making this topographical
map for NASA, could you also collect some rock samples
for us. They wanted them for a carbon dating and
a comprehensive mineral analysis. It was just to add to
the park's existing geological.
Speaker 1: Record, just a little side project.
Speaker 2: It was a secondary job that became the primary world
changing revelation.
Speaker 1: So this this seemingly minor side task, just collecting a
few hundred rocks, That's where the whole mystery begins.
Speaker 3: That's it.
Speaker 2: And the source material really emphasizes how Christiansen had to
hike all over the park, I mean huge swabs of it.
He was taking samples not just from the surface, but
also from cliffs, from geothermal vents everywhere.
Speaker 1: And these samples get sent back to the lab, they
get processed, and they come back with a profoundly strange story.
Speaker 3: To tell a very strange story.
Speaker 1: So what did the mineral analysis in the carbon dating
actually reveal?
Speaker 2: They revealed that most of the rock composition in Yellowstone.
We're talking the bedrock, the massive layers of tough which
is basically volcanic ash, is made up of something called rhyolite, And.
Speaker 1: For anyone who's into geology, rhyolite is a massive red flag.
It's a key indicator of huge explosive volcanic activity. It is.
Speaker 2: And what's so fascinating here is that rhyolite because it's
so silica rich and viscous, like thick, sticky magma. It
only forms when you have these high pressure magma flows
or massive of explosive volcanic events.
Speaker 1: So we are not talking about the slow Uzi Hawaiian style.
Speaker 3: Lava flows, No, not at all. This is the complete opposite.
Speaker 2: We are talking about highly pressurized, volatile, catastrophic eruptions.
Speaker 3: The chemistry of rhylite is the key. That high silica.
Speaker 2: Content it traps enormous amounts of gas, and that trapped
gas is the engine for the blast.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the rocks are screaming massive explosion. But here's
the contradiction. The thing that was apparently driving Christians and
crazy as he was looking at this data, the geology
clearly showed that this entire landscape was a result of
several massive, catastrophic eruptions over the last two million years. Yet,
as everyone knew at the time, there are no active
volcanoes in Yellowstone right, No cones, no towering cones, no
classic Mount Fuji or Mount Rainier strata volcano shapes. So
you have all this evidence of unimaginably huge explosions everywhere,
but the physical volcano, the actual mountain, was nowhere to
be seen, at least not in the way anyone understood
a volcano to look.
Speaker 2: So Christiansen's initial assessment was actually highly logical. I mean,
given the hundreds of unique geological features scattered across this
massive region, from the geysers in the west to the
hot springs in the east, he had to connect the
dots somehow, right, and he initially speculated that all these
features were the product of an ancient volcano chain that
had long since gone dormant. It's similar to the volcanic
fields you see along the Cascade Range, but maybe just
older and more eroded, which makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1: Multiple distinct cones, multiple distinct eruptions over millions of years,
scattered localized evidence. It fits what he was seeing on
the ground.
Speaker 2: It's the only theory that fit the ground level data.
Speaker 1: And you have to remember he's a geologist on the
ground making sense of ground samples. He's looking at the debris,
at the mess it made, not the hole it came from.
Speaker 3: That's the key.
Speaker 2: The sheer vastness of the true structure made it literally
invisible from his vantage point. I mean, you can't see
the true shape of a mountain range when you're standing
in the middle of it. Little in the shape of
something that's defined by its negative space, its absence precisely.
And this brings us to the moment of shock, the
big Aha moment in nineteen seventy two. This was a
really pivotal point in geological.
Speaker 1: History because NASA's long term satellite mapping project, but when
he was helping with, finally yielded its final images, and
crucially this included infrared pictures of the entire Yellowstone region.
Speaker 2: And Christensen, when he's looking at this assembled satellite mosaic,
he was just stunned. The infrared pictures provided this massive
synoptic perspective that no geologists could ever achieve.
Speaker 1: From the ground. You can see the whole forest, not
just the.
Speaker 2: Trees exactly, especially when the features are covered by forests
or hidden by topography, and these imagies, they just completely
refuted his ancient.
Speaker 1: Chain theory, just blew it out of the water instantly.
Speaker 2: The images revealed the true scope of the area by
showing the pattern of the heat signatures and the mineral deposits,
and that pattern defined an enormous circular shape, a shape
far larger than any single volcano anyone had ever conceived of.
Speaker 1: So all those separate features they all connected.
Speaker 2: The images showed that the unique geological features, all those
separate pools, geysers, and lava flows were not formed by
a chain of distinct, separate volcanoes. Instead, they were all
part of a single colossal subterranean structure that was defined
by a collapse, a massive caldera.
Speaker 3: Wow, it was the scar of the eruption.
Speaker 1: And the sources are really clear on the context of
this finding. This wasn't just a big collapse. It indicated
a single supervolcano.
Speaker 2: And that term supervolcano gets thrown around, but the source
material makes a critical point about scale that you really
need to grasp. Of the over one thousand known volcanoes
on Earth, only about twenty are classified as supervolcanoes.
Speaker 1: And that's defined by an eruption magnitude of eight on
the Volcanic Exclusivity Index or VII.
Speaker 2: Right, a VEI eight the highest possible score, and Yellowstone.
Speaker 3: The data showed it was one of the biggest ever found.
Speaker 1: And this old discovery was purely accidental. It was a
magnificent side effect of just trying to check camera accuracy
for the space race.
Speaker 2: It's a profound example of how technology, when you deploy
it for one purpose, can reveal these foundational secrets about
our planet that were hidden simply because of their sheer
unimatchable size.
Speaker 1: When the thing you're studying is continental and scale, you
need a continental vantage point to even see it.
Speaker 3: That's it.
Speaker 2: It was the negative space, the collapsed roof of this
gigantic magma chamber that finally defined the danger.
Speaker 1: Okay, so now we know it's there, Let's talk about
the scale, because that's where this gets truly terrifying. To
really grasp it, we have to look back at the
timeline established by Christiansen's initial rock dating.
Speaker 2: Right, Geologists now recognize three immense calleddera forming eruptions in
Yellowstone's history, and the biggest known eruption, the one that
really shaped the landscape as we know. It is known
as the Huckleberry Ridge eruption, and it took place about
two million years ago.
Speaker 1: And that event, it didn't just rewrite the geology of
North America. The data shows it fundamentally changed the global climate.
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely.
Speaker 2: It launched as much as six hundred cubic miles of
red hot lava, ash and rocks into the air.
Speaker 3: Six hundred cubic miles.
Speaker 1: I can't even picture what that means. Six hundred cubic miles.
Speaker 3: It's almost impossible to picture.
Speaker 2: But we can see the evidence. The remnants of this event,
what's called the Huckleberry Ridge tough can be found hundreds
of miles away. That just shows you the extent of
the sprint. It's a layer of ash that covers a
huge portion of the United States.
Speaker 1: Okay, we need a comparison, something that really sticks with
you and conveys the sheer terror of this thing. We're
all familiar with a Mount Saint Helen's eruption in nineteen.
Speaker 2: Eighty, a huge catastrophic event in its own right, a
VEI five right.
Speaker 1: It devastated a huge section of Washington State, killed dozens
of people that historic explosion which generated so much ash
it changed the weather temporarily. Yeah, the source material tells
the Yellowstone Huckleberry explosion was a terrifying VII eight event,
and volumetrically it was twenty five hundred times bigger.
Speaker 2: The difference in scale is paralyzing, it really is. Saint
Helens was a regional disaster. Yellowstone is a continental, even
planetary event.
Speaker 1: Explain that what's the difference.
Speaker 2: Well, the ash from Saint Helens disrupted air travel and
farming for a few weeks, mostly across the Pacific Northwest.
An eruption twenty five hundred times larger is not a
regional inconvenience. It is a global inflection.
Speaker 1: Point, a civilization level event.
Speaker 2: Without a doubt, the sheer volume of material launched into
the atmosphere would block sunlight across an entire hemisphere, and
the immediate ash fall would render huge parts of the
American West completely uninhabitable. We are talking about ash layers
that could be dozens of feet deep, extending across several states.
Speaker 1: Okay, but the critical question, the one everyone's thinking is,
does this immense history mean it's over? Can we just
rely on the idea that this is ancient history and
not a current threat.
Speaker 2: No, absolutely not, and that's the scary part. Yellowstone's fury
may not be finished. While the supervolcano has been dormant
for about half a million years, the last major event,
the Lava Creek eruption, was around six hundred and thirty
thousand years ago.
Speaker 3: The danger has not passed.
Speaker 1: It's not extinct, not even close.
Speaker 2: Geological data, modern monitoring it all shows that the lava
chambers still exist and that lava still flows within this
massive system right underneath Yellowstone National Park. Dormancy does not
mean extinct. It means it's resting, and crucially, it is
active right now beneath the surface.
Speaker 1: So how do we know it's active. What are the signs?
Speaker 3: Well, the most obvious sign is the park itself.
Speaker 2: The entire massive hydrothermal system, with all its geysers and
hot springs and mud pots. All of that requires an
enormous heat source to function.
Speaker 1: Old Faithful needs fuel, It.
Speaker 2: Needs a gigantic furnace. And this is not just leftover
residual heat from an old eruption. This is continuous, high
intensity magma activity happening very close.
Speaker 3: To the earth crust.
Speaker 1: But the resting phase might be ending. And this is
where it gets really concerning. We received a major alarm
bell in twenty twenty two that prompted some very serious
scientific discussion.
Speaker 2: This is where we shift from historical fact to modern,
urgent scientific findings that should frankly alarm you. A pivotal
study was published in the journal Science in twenty twenty
two and it provided some extremely detailed and alarming data.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't just speculation. This was research using advanced
seismic tomography and networks of GPS monitors all across.
Speaker 2: The park, exactly the most advanced monitoring technology we have.
Speaker 1: So what did this detailed modern monitoring reveal.
Speaker 2: It showed that the lava chambers under the park are
rapidly filling, and crucially that the resurgent dome, which is
an area of the caldera floor that literally rises and
falls with magma pressure, is experiencing measurable unusual uplift.
Speaker 1: The ground is breathing, it's bulging.
Speaker 2: They observed vertical displacement data from the GPS station showing
that the ground is subtly but significantly rising in specific
zones and this indicates accelerated magma migration and pressurization deep
below the surface, specifically in the shallow magma reservoir.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's play skeptic here for a minute. Yellowstone is
a long term geological cycle, right, We're talking half million
year intervals. So is a filling lava chamber just correlation?
Is it normal background noise that we're sensationalizing because we
have better tools to see it.
Speaker 2: Now, that is a fair and a critical question, and
we absolutely must avoid sensationalizing normal geological processes. But the
data points to unusual stress, the rate of uplift, the
specific locations, it's not what you call baseline. And this
uplift is compounded by the persistent and intense seismic activity
that the park experiences.
Speaker 3: Naturally, it experiences a lot a ton.
Speaker 2: Yellowstone has over three thousand earthquakes a year. Now, most
are tiny, you'd never feel them, but that is a
massive amount of continuous stress and strain on the subterranean structure.
It suggests that the crust, the lid on top of
this pressurized magma, is under continuous measurable duress.
Speaker 1: So we connect all these dots. We have a super
volcano known for cataclysmic past events, we have a twenty
twenty two finding of rapidly filling magma chambers and measurable
grounds uplift, and we have intense continuous seismic activity.
Speaker 2: Put it all together and it leads some researchers to
speculate with very serious concern that the supervolcano may be preparing.
Speaker 3: To erupt once again.
Speaker 1: The signs are there.
Speaker 2: The signs of increasing geological stress observed through our best
technology are undeniable. Even if the exact timing remains completely unknown.
It could be tomorrow, it could be ten thousand years
from now, We.
Speaker 1: Just don't know. So, Okay, what does this all mean
for us? Let's get to this. So what the catastrophic outcome.
If the next eruption is similar to the last massive one,
the consequences go beyond regional, They become continental, maybe even global, and.
Speaker 2: They would absolutely trigger massive climate disruption.
Speaker 1: The danger isn't just the immedia lava or the pyroclastic flow.
I mean, that would obviously devastate the Northern Rockies, no question.
Speaker 3: It would be gone.
Speaker 1: But the real global danger is the atmospheric disruption. It's
the immense volume of sulfur dioxide and fine ash that
gets thrown into the stratosphere, and it.
Speaker 2: Would spew enough debris and sulfur aerosols into the sky
to essentially block out the sun not just in the
Western United States, but potentially across the entire northern hemisphere
for how long?
Speaker 3: For decades?
Speaker 1: Decades? Think about that. Think about the impact on everything
from agriculture, to solar power to I don't know, mental health.
Speaker 2: This scenario, it's often referred to as a volcanic winter,
and it is not science fiction. The sulfur aerosols would
form these highly reflective clouds, and global temperatures would drop significantly.
Speaker 1: And if you lose consistent sunlight and you get a
volcanic winter in the world's most productive agricultural zones, even
for just a few years.
Speaker 2: It leads directly to widespread crop failure, global famine, and
total economic collapse, simply because the food supply chains would
completely break down.
Speaker 1: This raises the terrifying question, how do you even prepare
for an event of that magnitude.
Speaker 2: The honest answer is you don't not really. Short of
continental relocation or building massive enclosed food production facilities on
a scale we can't imagine, you can't.
Speaker 1: Prepare so the only solace is the geological timescale.
Speaker 2: It is, as one expert in the source material concludes
this segment, we can only hope for another half million
at least. It's just a sobering reflectant on the sheer
power of the forces we live on top of and
the incredible vulnerability of our modern, interconnected society to a
fundamental planetary change.
Speaker 1: Wow, we went from NASA mapping techniques to discussing global
societal breakdown in what ten minutes.
Speaker 2: It's a testament to the magnitude of what is quietly
waiting beneath the Yellowstone.
Speaker 1: Okay, now, let's transition, because the pressure building under Yellowstone
is terrifying, but it might pale in comparison to the insidious,
invisible threat that's being unleashed by the same forces of
heat and climate change. But in the far.
Speaker 2: North, a completely different kind of threat.
Speaker 1: Right. Not all existential threats erupt dramatically from below. Some
and perhaps these are more in cities, They just melt
out from above.
Speaker 2: And we transition from the American West to the vast,
frozen and increasingly thawing landscape of Siberia. Specifically, we're going
to the Yamal Peninsula in.
Speaker 1: The northwest, and our focus shifts drastically here from magma
to microbiology, but the theme remains completely unified, ancient forces
being reawakened by modern heat and environmental disruption.
Speaker 2: The narrative begins around twenty sixteen, and it follows a
period of several years of really unusual warmth for that region.
Speaker 1: And we hear this chilling account. It starts with a
single farmer in this remote small town who finds the
carcass of one of.
Speaker 2: His reindeer, which you know initially that's not totally unusual.
Animals die, but the pace of death quickly, dramatically accelerates,
and over the next month, local herders watched in just
absolute horror as more and more of their reindeer livestock
got sick and then died.
Speaker 1: The scale of the loss here became devastating, not just
economically but culturally. The sources state that in all over
twelve hundred reindeer ended up dying in a very concentrated
area and timeframe.
Speaker 2: And for these communities, you have to understand, reindeer herding
is everything. It's their entire economy, it's their way of life,
it's their culture. This was an economic collapse coupled with
a massive biological mystery, and.
Speaker 1: The villager's initial explanation was actually pretty logical for the region.
They connected the effect to the obvious cause, see the heat.
They blamed the deaths on stress the animals were undergoing
due to that summer's unusually high temperatures, which had been
unprecedented in recent memory. They were thinking heat stroke. They
were missing the truly terrifying biological mechanism that was actually
at play.
Speaker 2: And the focus shifts dramatically when the villagers themselves start
getting sick.
Speaker 1: Right, locals started developing these classic telltale signs, very high
fevers and these painful localized sores on their skin. We
now know this as cutaneous anthrax.
Speaker 2: And it escalated so fast. Ninety villagers fell critically ill
and had to be hospitalized, and heartbreakingly, one six child
tragically died. And the human cost that's what brought immediate
international attention to this remote medical crisis.
Speaker 1: And the doctors treating them. You know, these are highly
skilled people, but they were working in a very remote region.
They were completely baffled by what they were seeing.
Speaker 3: They had no idea what it was.
Speaker 1: None they were running blood tests, throat swabs, every test
they could think of, but everything kept coming back negative
for known local pathogens, even for common illnesses. It was
a medical mystery unfolding in real time, with lives hanging
in the balance because they just couldn't name the enemy.
Speaker 2: And then finally, one specialist test broke through the mystery.
It confirmed the pathogen and the result was truly shocking.
It connected the depths of all those reindeer directly to
the human illness.
Speaker 1: The finding was Bacillus anthrasis.
Speaker 3: Which we know much more commonly as anthrax.
Speaker 1: Now. Most people, especially in the US, when they hear anthrax,
they think of bioterrorism, biological weapons, the attacks after nine
to eleven.
Speaker 3: The white powder and the male exactly.
Speaker 1: But the historical documentation we reviewed for this it clarifies
the reality. While it is absolutely weaponizable, anthrax occurs naturally
and its persistence is due to its incredible ability to
form spores and soils all of the world.
Speaker 2: And it's the mechanism of infection that's so critical in
this Siberian context where the environment in the summer is
very dry and dusty, So what happens animals like reindeer
they're grazing, and as they graze, they disturb the soil.
If that soil contains anthrax spores, they kick them up
and these spores form little dust clouds in the dry
summer heat.
Speaker 1: And the animals just breathe it in.
Speaker 2: They inhale the dust and become infected. And that is
often the most lethal form inhalation anthrax. It can lead
to systemic failure very very quickly.
Speaker 1: Once that thraxes inside the body, the bacteria just triggers yep,
it grows incredibly quickly. It produces these potent toxins that
lead to severe symptoms like high fevers, difficulty breathing, tissue necrosis.
Speaker 2: Here's the biological time bomb element. This is what makes
this pathogen so persistent and so dangerous in the wild,
particularly when you start thinking about permafrost.
Speaker 1: Okay, what is that.
Speaker 2: Unlike a lot of bacteria that just die off after
their host is gone, be anthrasis. When it's exposed to
oxygen or harsh conditions, it forms these highly durable, metabolically
inactive spools.
Speaker 1: They go into hibernation, a.
Speaker 3: Very very deep hibernation.
Speaker 2: So after an infected animal dies, its body decomposes and
In doing so, it spills even more of these anthrax
spores right back into the earth. The spores are designed
by evolution to survive everything UV, radiation, drying out, freezing.
Speaker 1: So the source describes it as a ticking time bomb.
Speaker 3: It's the perfect description.
Speaker 2: It's just sitting there waiting for its next unfortunate host
to come up long and disturb the soil.
Speaker 1: And for humans, the danger is acute. We saw this
outbreak manifest as cutaneous ansrax on the skin in many
of the adults, which is treatable if you catch it early.
But the inhalation form, the one that typically kills the
large grazing animals, is far far more dangerous.
Speaker 2: Even with modern fast acting treatment, which is already a
huge challenge to administer in remote Siberian towns, the fatality
rate in humans from inhalation amberrex can be as high
as around.
Speaker 1: Eighty percent eighty.
Speaker 2: Percent, and that just underscores why this outbreak, even though
it geographically contained, at first, represented such a terrifying mobilization
of an ancient, incredibly legal foe.
Speaker 1: So as the government officials were rushing to contain this outbreak,
they had to figure out where it came from. What
was the original source, right.
Speaker 2: And they quickly realized that this wasn't a new introduction
of anthrax into the area. This was a reawakening, a
reawakening of a terrible past, literally unearthed by climate change.
The way they find they discovered that in the early
nineteen hundreds, Siberia was ravaged by a series of cruely
terrible anthrax outbreaks. The historical records they dug up showed
the scale of loss back then was just staggering. More
than a million reindeer died a million a million, and
their infective carcasses were just left left across the vast,
sparsely populated tundra.
Speaker 1: And this is the critical connection point. This is where
the Arctic environment itself becomes part of the weapon it does.
Speaker 2: Some of those remains, dating back a century or more
were naturally frozen deep within the permafrost, and permafrost which
is ground that stays continuously below freezing for at least
two years. It acts as a gigantic natural freezer.
Speaker 1: So it was, as the source says, essentially refrigerating the
dead deer in the bacteria inside of them.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: It was keeping those highly dangerous spores alive and perfectly
viable through cryogenic preservation.
Speaker 1: And we need to understand why the permafrost is such
a perfect biological freezer. It's not just that it's cold, No,
it's more than that.
Speaker 2: It's a knoxic which means there are very low oxygen levels,
and that prevents the normal aerobic decay that would usually
break down these spores over decades.
Speaker 1: Plus, being very deep protects them from UV radiation from the.
Speaker 2: Sun, another major killer of bacteria viruses. So they were
in effect perfectly sealed biological time capsules waiting, and.
Speaker 1: That perfect seal was broken broken by a combination of
these unusual heat events.
Speaker 2: The release was kicked off by a series of extreme,
long duration heat waves. Starting in the year twenty eleven.
The area began to experience five consecutive years of unusually
warm summers and that led right up to the twenty
sixteen outbreak.
Speaker 1: And this sustained record breaking heat. It caused a widespread
phenomenon across the entire Arctic that's known as thermokarst.
Speaker 2: Which is just a scientific term for the melting of
previously stable permafrost, and this melt exposed those ancient dormant
Anthrax spores that had been locked away in the ice
and undisturbed burial sites for over one hundred years, and.
Speaker 1: Once they were exposed to the flightly warmer surface environment,
they were free, free to re enter the ecosystem and
infect the next grazing animal that came by.
Speaker 2: And that's what initiated the catastrophic chain reaction that we
saw in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: So the officials had to move incredibly fast to contain
this ancient plague.
Speaker 3: They did.
Speaker 2: They launched a massive, extremely difficult operation. They were scouring
the remote tundra undertaking the grim and dangerous task of
burning thousands of infected reindeer carcasses.
Speaker 1: Why burn them.
Speaker 2: To sterilize the ground and prevent any more spars from
getting into the soil.
Speaker 3: And this was a logistical nightmare.
Speaker 2: It required specialized biohazard teams, vast quantities of fuel to
ensure complete incineration, all in the difficult, uneven terrain.
Speaker 3: Of the tundra.
Speaker 1: And at the same time, they launched a huge vaccination operation, a.
Speaker 2: Massive one, vaccinating tens of thousands of living reindeer to
try and create a buffer zone and stop the disease
from spreading further among the herds, and it worked.
Speaker 3: It did.
Speaker 2: This intensive, coordinated, and incredibly expensive effort gradually worked. The
number of new cases started to slow down, and eventually
the outbreak completely stopped. It was a victory, but a
terrifying one because it was only a localized battle, a
localized battle in a much larger, ongoing war against a
warming world.
Speaker 1: And what's so interesting here is that while anthrax is
a known entity, I mean, we have vaccines, we have treatments,
the broader threat goes so far beyond it.
Speaker 2: So much Further scientific research that was reviewed and the
source material indicates that it is very likely that more
pathogens life frozen under the Arctic ice, just waiting for
the temperature to rise enough for them to thaw out
and become biologically active again.
Speaker 1: And this raises a profound and truly unnerving concern, the
danger of novel exposure. If rising temperatures continue to melt
the permafrost, humans and animals will inevitably be exposed to
these ancient pathogens, and unlike anthrax, many of these threats
will be entirely new to the modern world. They could
date back tens of thousands of years.
Speaker 3: And modern humans have never.
Speaker 2: Had exposure to before never, and this is the critical distinction.
Our immune systems have no memory of them. We have
no acquired immunity. Our medical science has no ready made
treatments or vaccines because we haven't even identified what they
are yet.
Speaker 1: We're not just talking about re emerging historical plagues like
the Spanish flu or something.
Speaker 2: No. We are talking about truly novel viruses and bacteria
that evolved in a world that was fundamentally different from
our own, things that preyed on neanderthals or wooly mammoths.
Speaker 1: That makes the biological threat, in a way, potentially more
unpredictable and insidious than the geological one. I think so
with the supervolcano, we know the magnitude. It's a clear
massive destructive event, but we don't know the lethality, or
the transmissibility or the clinical presentation of a twenty thousand
year old thought out virus. The uncertainty itself is the
deepest threat, which is why.
Speaker 2: The source provides such a chilling and unavoidable summation of
the whole situation. As one researcher puts it, regarding thet's
mouth and this systematic release of ancient, unknown contagions. What
they say, he says, this is Pandora's box. Wow, and
it signifies that once these threats are released, there is
no simple way to seal them back up. We are
dealing with global climate changes unleashing forces dormant pathogens that
have been safely contained since before the dawn of recorded
human history, and we have absolutely no idea what tools
we will need to fight them.
Speaker 1: That quote just perfectly encapsulates the gravity of both of
these threats we've talked about.
Speaker 3: It really does.
Speaker 1: Okay, Wow, we have covered some immense ground today. I mean,
from the detailed geological process of rhyolite formation and NASA's
completely accidental mapping of the Yellowstone Caldera, all.
Speaker 2: The way to the frightening implications of bacterial spores being
perfectly preserved in Arctic ice for over a century.
Speaker 1: Let's just quickly recap the two massive ancient threats we've
uncovered in this deep dive on Thrilling Threads. First the
Yellowstone supervolcano, which was accidentally revealed by a Aceline satellite
map and is now showing alarming signs of subterranean repressurization.
Speaker 2: And second, the ancient anthrax plague, which was released by
a series of unusually hot Siberian summers melting the permafrost.
Speaker 1: The central theme that really emerges for you, the learner,
is that we are dealing with these forces geological and
biological that have been dormant for millennia, and in.
Speaker 2: Both cases, human activity, specifically in the form of climate
change and environmental pressure, is the key factor in their reawakening.
It requires us to really engage in critical thinking about
these low probability.
Speaker 1: Events, because if they do occur.
Speaker 2: They are supremely high impact. We have to acknowledge that
human activity is now influencing forces that were previously purely
planetary or evolutionary.
Speaker 1: When you look at the evidence side by side, you know,
the two thousand, five hundred times bigger than Saint Helen's
eruption potential versus the eighty percent fatality rate of a
reawakened novel pathogen. It forces a really difficult, almost philosophical
comparison of catastrophes.
Speaker 2: It really does. On one hand, you have the swift,
massive global catastrophe, the supervolcano, where the damage is immediate,
it's atmospheric, it's infrastructural. It leads to mass famine and
economic collapse. The outcome, while devastating, is scientifically predictable in
terms of its mechanism. We know how ash and sulfur
aerosols work. And on the other hand, on the other
you have the slower spreading biological threat from a completely
unknown ancient pathogen. Here the threat is insidious, it's invisible,
and it's fundamentally immunological. We know the mechanism of release
the permafrost is melting, but the mechanism of effect the
pathogen's actual lethality is a total unknown.
Speaker 1: The question of preparedness is key here. Dealing with a
fallout from a supervolcano requires massive infrastructural resilience, vast ORed
resources global cooperation to manage a volcanic.
Speaker 2: Winter, whereas dealing with an unknown ancient pathogen requires medical
science we may not even possess yet. It requires rapid
genetic sequencing capabilities on a global scale and a kind
of immunological foresight.
Speaker 1: And that difference really defines the challenge, doesn't it It does.
Speaker 2: We can model the ash plume from a supervolcano, we
can model the temperature drop. We cannot model the infectivity
rate or the specific lethallity of a twenty thousand year
old virus until it is already here spreading among us.
The known certainty of the geological threat paradoxically might make
it easier to mentally address than the complete, unpredictable novelty
of the biological threat.
Speaker 1: So that brings us to our final thought for you,
the listener. We've unpacked the data on both of these
immense ancient reawakening threats. Given the choice between a massive, predictable,
swift volcanic catastrophe and a slow spreading biological thread from
an entirely unknown agent pathogen, which type of danger seems
more manageable to prepare for and which one keeps you
up at.
Speaker 2: Night when you're considering the long term future. Which threat
the geological fury beneath Yellowstone, which we know can literally
reshape continents, or the possible ability of an unknown frozen
killer emerging from the melting ice do you think humanity
is least prepared to handle. We encourage you to share
your thoughts and join the discussion on this week's Deep
dive