Speaker 1: Imagine standing entirely alone on this this seemingly endless expanse
of blinding, unbroken white. You are positioned at the absolute
edge of the habitable world. The air is so unimaginably
cold that every single breath you pull into your lungs
feels like inhaling shattered glass.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, it's an aggressive cold.
Speaker 1: Right, And the silence around you isn't just an absence
of noise, it's a physical weight. It is a crushing,
absolute stillness that presses against your ear drums. Beneath your
heavy winter boots lies a sheet of ice and frozen
earth that hasn't seen the light of the sun or
even felt the fleeting warmth of a spring breeze for
tens of thousands of years.
Speaker 2: Basically a locked vault, exactly.
Speaker 1: It feels permanent, like an unbreakable vault carved by the slow,
indifferent hand of nature herself. You could stomp on it,
you could take a steel pickaxe to it, and it
would simply absorb the impact without a scratch. But then,
as you are standing there in the profound, sensory depriving
isolation of the Arctic, you hear a sound. It starts
as a low, deep guttural rumble vibrating up through the
soles of your boots, and then a sharp, deafening crack
echoes across the desolate landscape.
Speaker 3: The scariest sound you could hear out there.
Speaker 1: It really is. It's a terrifying visceral noise because that crack,
that is the sound of the world's largest freezer door
suddenly swinging open. Welcome to thrilling threads. We are taking
you on a journey to the absolute edge of the world.
Speaker 2: And the stakes of this journey, I mean, they could
not be higher. When we talk about the Arctic, we
aren't just discussing a remote, hostile ecosystem. We're talking about
an environment that operates as a massive accidental time capsule.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Accidental is the perfect word for it, right, because for millennia,
the permafrost, that continuously frozen layer of soil, rock and ice,
has functioned as nature's ultimate preservation system. It locks away biology,
human history, and these deep time secrets and a flawless
state of suspended animation.
Speaker 1: But the vault is cracking.
Speaker 2: It is the critical context framing our entire discussion today
is this. The Arctic is currently warming at a rate
significantly faster than anywhere else on our planet. That unbreakable
vault you just described, it's losing its structural integrity.
Speaker 1: The locks are melting, the freezer is aggressively emptying its contents.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it's surrendering things that have been hidden away for
centuries or even tens of thousands of years straight into
the modern world.
Speaker 1: And the sources we've compiled for this, these archaeological field reports,
genetic sequencing data, recent scientific transcripts, they paint a picture
that is both onspiring and honestly deeply unsettling.
Speaker 2: Unsettling is putting it mildly.
Speaker 1: Right, because we aren't just talking about glaciers receding to
reveal some bare rock. We are looking at a thaw
that is vomiting up ancient predators, perfectly preserved lost human civilizations,
and perhaps most alarmingly, highly lethal pathogens that haven't interacted
with a human immune system since the Place to See epoch.
Speaker 2: It's as if the Earth hit pause thousands of years ago,
and now due to these unprecedented atmospheric changes, the fast
forward button has been jammed down, jammed down hard, and
the magnitude of what is being uncovered requires us to
completely reevaluate our understanding of history and biology. You have
to understand that permafrost doesn't just fossilize bone, you know,
it doesn't just turn it to stone over millions of
years like traditional paleontological beds.
Speaker 1: It preserves the soft stuff.
Speaker 2: Yes, it preserves organic matter, soft tissue, delicate fur, stomach contents,
and crucially, microscopic DNA. It provides an unprecedented, high definition
biological window into the past.
Speaker 1: But opening that window comes with some very real, unquantifiable
modern day risks. The Arctic is currently handing us a
masterclass in history, evolutionary biology, and epidemiology all simultaneously. So
let's start with the biology, because some of these discoveries
feel like they were pulled straight from a science fiction novel.
Speaker 2: Oh, totally like something out of a movie.
Speaker 1: We're heading to northern Siberia, specifically to this incredibly remote
region near a village called Tumut. The initial discoveries happened
in twenty eleven, followed by another one in twenty fifteen.
Researchers are painstakingly excavating the thawing permafrost, working in mud
and freezing water, and they pull out something that completely
defies initial comprehension.
Speaker 2: They weren't just ancient calcified bones scattered in the dirt.
Speaker 1: No, they found two small pups. And when I say pups,
I mean they had their fur, their skin, their little snouts,
their eyelashes.
Speaker 2: The eyelashes always get me right.
Speaker 1: Their internal organs were completely intact. The photographs from the
field reports are uncanny. It looks as though they had
just curled up in the dirt and fallen asleep a
few days prior, except carbon dating placed their desks at
over fourteen thousand years ago.
Speaker 2: Fourteen thousand years It's staggering, and the immediate mystery these
two specimens presented to the scientific community was profound. Place
yourself in the position of those researchers in twenty eleven.
You extract a perfectly preserved furry canine from fourteen thousand
year old.
Speaker 1: Ice, You're going to make some assumptions.
Speaker 2: Naturally, The first scientific assumption leans heavily toward early domestication.
The location of the discovery heavily influenced this hypothesis. These
pups were found in incredibly close proximity to what appeared
to be ancient human butchering sites.
Speaker 1: Ah so there were humans nearby.
Speaker 2: Exactly complete with burn mammoth bones and rudimentary tool fragments
scattered around the perimeter. So the logical, albeit romantic, leap
was thrilling. Had we just found definitive physical evidence of
humans keeping domesticated dogs as companions or hunting partners during
the ice age.
Speaker 1: It's an incredibly compelling narrative. I mean, the idea that
fourteen thousand years ago, an early human hunter was sitting
by a fire in the freezing Siberian step tossing a
piece of roasted mammoth meat to a proto dog sitting
loyally by their side. It paints a relatable, almost comforting
picture of early humanity finding companionship in the cold.
Speaker 2: It does. It's a beautiful story. But the genetic analysis
didn't quite support that domestic narrative, did it.
Speaker 1: It did not, And this is where the rigorous application
of modern genomic technology corrects our anthropological assumptions. The researchers
didn't just rely on visual identification, which is notoriously tricky
with juvenile canines, nor did they rely solely on geographical
proximity to human camps. They turned to genetic sequencing.
Speaker 2: Which is the gold standard.
Speaker 1: Now exactly, they extracted DNA from the exceptionally preserved tissues
of these pups. The results were definitive. These were not
early domesticated dogs. They were ancient, distinctively Pleistocene wolves.
Speaker 2: They were part of a specific lineage of wolves that
roamed the icy steps alongside the mammoths and the wooly rhinos.
The proximity to the human butchering site was likely just
a matter of opportunistic scavenging.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were probably lurking around the periphery of human
encampments hoping to scavenge discarded bones and scraps, much like
modern urban wildlife interaction with human settlements today.
Speaker 2: But clarifying their species was really just the beginning of
the scientific windfall here. Oh.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Because the permafrost acted like a flawless subterranean vacuum seal,
the internal organs of these pups were untouched by decomposition.
The scientists made the decision to perform an autopsy and
look inside the stomach of one of these fourteen thousand
year old wolf pups, and what.
Speaker 2: They found inside is a marvel of biological preservation. It's
like a prehistoric Russian nesting.
Speaker 1: Doll, a nesting doll. Yes, inside the stomach, they found
a piece of tissue with yellow hair still attached to it.
They analyzed this half digested chunk of meat and it
turned out to be the flesh of a wooly rhinoceros.
Speaker 2: The scientific significance of that specific detail is monumental. Finding
stomach contents in an ancient specimen is exceedingly rare. It
provides direct, irrefutable evidence of an animal's diet, its hunting patterns,
and its direct interaction with its immediate ecosystem.
Speaker 1: But this discovery went a massive step further than just saying, oh,
look they ate rhinos.
Speaker 2: It went so much further. From that partially digested chunk
of meat suspended inside the wolf pup's stomach, geneticists were
able to extract a complete wooly rhinoceros genome. Think about
the chain of preservation required for that sequence of events
to occur.
Speaker 1: The logistics of that are just staggering. You have a
prehistoric predator, a wolf pup that manages to scavenge a
piece of a prehistoric giant, the wooly rhino. The pup
swallows the meat, and very shortly after before its digestive
acids can fully break down the cellular structure of the
rhino flesh. The pup meets its own demise.
Speaker 2: It dies in an environment so profoundly cold that its
internal biological processes halt almost instantly.
Speaker 1: Right, the permafrost rapidly encases the pup, preserving the animal
itself and inadvertently perfectly preserving the pup's last meal inside
its stomach for one hundred and forty centuries, just waiting
for a human with a modern DNA sequencer to come along.
We literally acquired the genetic blueprint of a massive extinct
rainoceros by looking inside the gut of a tiny extinct wolf.
Speaker 2: It demonstrates the unparalleled power of the permafrost as an
ecological archive. Under normal circumstances, paleontology relies heavily on assembling fragmented,
fossilized bones to infer the lives of extinct creatures. We
measure the circumference of femurs to estimate body.
Speaker 1: Mass, right, It's a lot of educated guessing.
Speaker 2: Exactly, We analyze the isotopic composition of jawbones to guess
at dietary habits. It is a science of educated deduction.
But the permafrost hands us the unvarnished biological reality. We
don't have to theorize about the pleisosine wolf's diet. We
possess the actual meat it consumed. We don't have to
piece together the rhinos genetics from degraded bone marrow. We
have the complete high fidelity code.
Speaker 1: It transforms paleontology from a science of inference into a
science of direct observation. And those two map puppies are
just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to
ice age fauna, Siberia's permafrost has yielded some of the
most spectaclcular mammoth specimens in human history.
Speaker 2: The manths are incredible.
Speaker 1: They really are. The sources highlight too, in particular Luba
and Yuca. Liuba was discovered in two thousand and seven.
She's baby mammoth, estimated to be about forty two thousand
years old. When they pulled her from the mud. She
wasn't a skeleton, her skin, her trunk, her internal organs.
They were entirely intact.
Speaker 2: And then a few years later, in twenty ten, they
found Yuka, a young adult mammoth.
Speaker 1: The visceral reality of seeing these creatures rather than just
looking at their bones. It changes your perspective entirely. You
can look at high resolution photographs of them and see
the intricate wrinkles on their trunks. You can see the
textured pads on the soles of their feet.
Speaker 2: The discoveries of Luba and Yuka represent a profound paradigm
shift in our understanding of Pleistocene megafauna. Consider Yuka, for instance,
because she was a young adult, her body told a
highly complex lived story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she had a whole history exactly.
Speaker 2: The preservation was so exquisite that researchers could examine healed
injuries and scars across her body, some possibly inflicted by
predators like cave lions. They could study the specific microscopic
wear patterns.
Speaker 1: On her molars, which gives us something incredibly precious in
the field of ancient biology a biography.
Speaker 2: A biography, we aren't just examining a static representative of
a species. We are analyzing the lived experience of an
individual animal. We can see how she survived attacks, the
types of rough vegetation she foraged, and the cumulative toll
the extreme environment took on her physical form over years
of existence.
Speaker 1: It bridges that gap between a museum artifact and a living,
breathing creature. You start wondering about the specific day Yuka
sustain those injuries, or what drought forced her to eat
the abrasive plants that wore her teeth down, and the fur.
The sources detail how the fur was preserved so immaculately
that scientists could actually study its physical.
Speaker 2: Properties, right down to the thickness of the individual strands
and their exact pigmentation. That specific detail regarding the fur represents.
It's a monumental leap for evolutionary biology. Well. Prior to
recovering these perfectly preserved soft tissues, our understanding of how
these massive animals adapted to the extreme cold was largely theoretical.
It was based on their skeletal structure and loose comparisons
to their modern warm climate.
Speaker 1: Elephant relatives like elephants do this, so mammos probably.
Speaker 3: Did that exactly.
Speaker 2: But with Yuca and Luba, scientists could analyze the microscopic
structure of the hair follicles directly. They could measure the
density of the fine undercoat versus the longer, coarse guard hairs.
This empirical data allowed them to calculate the exact thermal
properties of a mammoths coat, and furthermore, examining the remarkably
preserved fat layers beneath the skin. The brown fat designed
for thermogenesis, provided concrete data on how these animals stored
and utilized energy to survive the brutal extended winters of
the ice age. Is the difference between reading a theoretical
description of an engine and actually popping the hood to
observe the mechanics in action.
Speaker 1: The ice is essentially handing us the biological instruction manual
for ice age survival.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
Speaker 1: But as captivating as the megafauna are, the permafrost holds
something even more profound. It holds our own history. The
ice didn't just trap wolves and mammoths, It trapped human civilization,
and in doing so, it has forced archaeologists to aggressively
rewrite the timeline of human endurance.
Speaker 2: That is a crucial point. For decades, there's a rigid
consensus in the anthropological community regarding human habitation of the
extreme North.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, the old timeline right.
Speaker 2: The prevailing theory dictated that the Arctic environment was simply
too hostile to resource scarce and too relentlessly cold for
early humans to establish permanent year round settlements north of
the Arctic Circle until roughly fifteen thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: They just assumed we couldn't hack it.
Speaker 2: The academic assumption was that early humans migrating out of
warmer climates lacked the necessary technological sophistication and social organization
to survive there permanently.
Speaker 1: That was the accepted truth until a Russian archaeologist named
Vladimir Potolko began excavating along the Jana River in northern
Siberia in two thousand and one. This site is situated
well above the Arctic Circle in a landscape that is
unforgiving even by modern standards. His team started digging into
the permafrost, and what they pulled out of the frozen
earth completely shattered that fifteen thousand year.
Speaker 3: Timeline, completely shattered it.
Speaker 1: The artifacts they uncovered radiocarbon dated back thirty one thousand
to thirty two thousand years ago. That doesn't just push
the timeline of human Arctic habitation back, it literally doubles it.
Speaker 2: It was a seismic shock to anthropological history to find
definitive evidence of permanent human occupation at that extreme latitude
during that specific brutal climatic period of the Pleistocene requires
us to drastically reevaluate the cognitive and adaptive capabilities of
our ancestors.
Speaker 1: I try to wrap my head around the logistics of
that survival, and it's staggering. Put yourself in that Siberian
environment years ago. The temperature is hovering well below freezing
for the fast majority of the year. The wind is relentless.
You don't have gortex, you don't have insulated synthetic boots,
and you certainly don't have the luxury of imported calories.
Speaker 2: Not at all.
Speaker 1: Yet the evidence shows this wasn't just a desperate, freezing
group of wanderers who took a wrong turn, huddled in
a cave and died in the snow. Patolko's team excavated
over two thousand, five hundred distinct artifacts.
Speaker 2: That volume alone tells a story.
Speaker 1: They found spear points intricately and deliberately carved from the
dense ivory of mammoth tusks. They found finely crafted bone needles,
scrapers for hides, and even decorative beads.
Speaker 2: The beads are fascinating.
Speaker 1: The presence of beads is astounding. It means they had
the surplus time and energy for art and personal adornment
in a frozen wasteland. They also found a massive accumulation
of animal bones, mammoths, wooly rhinos, bison, Arctic foxes, and reindeer.
Speaker 2: The sheer, volume, variety, and craftsmanship of those artifacts paint
a vivid picture of a highly organized, thriving society. The
presence of such diverse megafauna remains indicates not just opportunistic
scavenging of already dead animals, but coordinated strategic hunting.
Speaker 1: Slaying a mammoth with a hand thrown ivory spear, I mean,
that's a logistical and physical masterpiece.
Speaker 2: It requires but profound intergenerational knowledge of animal behavior and
intimate understanding of the treacherous terrain and sophisticated weapon engineering.
But beyond the violence of the hunt, the true marvel
is the mundane daily survival. To endure temperatures that cold
for most of the year, this community had to have
mastered several highly complex technologies.
Speaker 1: The clothing alone is an engineering feat. You have to
hunt the animals painstakingly, scrape and cure the hide so
they don't rot. Or freeze solid, and then use those
tiny bone needles to stitch them together tightly enough to
create windproof.
Speaker 3: Waterproof garments and food storage.
Speaker 1: Exactly, you can't just casually forage or hunt every single
day the dark depths of a Siberian winter. They had
to possess advanced knowledge of how to preserve massive amounts
of meat, likely utilizing the freezing environment itself as a
natural larder to survive the lean months.
Speaker 2: The Janna River settlement serves as undeniable proof that these
early humans possessed a profound, almost symbiotic understanding of their environment.
They weren't merely clinging to life. The presence of those
decorative ivree beads suggests a society with enough chloric surplus
to engage in complex cultural and esthetic practices.
Speaker 1: They weren't just surviving, they were living.
Speaker 2: They had developed a robust social structure necessary to divide
labor efficiently. Some individuals were dedicated to tracking and hunting,
others to the labor intensive process of preparing hides. Someone
had to maintain the life saving fires, and crucially, someone
had to pass this vast repository of survival knowledge to
the next generation.
Speaker 1: This single archaeological site really dismantled the Eurocentric notion that
extreme cold was an instant, fountable barrier to early human
intellect and settlement. It demonstrated that human ingenuity, foresight, and
adaptability are incredibly ancient evolutionary traits. Absolutely, but the permafrost
doesn't just hold the tools of ancient strangers. It holds
the direct physical ancestors of people living today. Let's trace
that human endurance from Siberia across the Bearing Strait over
to southwest Alaska to an archaeological permafrost site known as Nunilek.
Speaker 2: This is a remarkable site, it really is.
Speaker 1: This site is much more recent, dating back about six
thousand years, but the preservation is arguably even more intimate.
Just like the Pleistocene fauna, the permafrost worked its magic
on the human history here. Archaeologists have carefully recovered the
remains of roughly one hundred and forty individuals so far,
and the cold has preserved them to the point where
many still have soft tissue clinging to their bones.
Speaker 2: The Nunilect site is a phenomenal, almost unprecedented example of
holistic cultural preservation. When archaeologists excavated typical six thousand year
old site in a temperate European or African climate. They
usually find resilient materials, stones, perhaps some durable pottery and fragmented.
Speaker 1: Bone, hard stuff.
Speaker 2: Right the organic materials, the woods, the leather, the woven
plant fibers, the clothing, they're entirely absent. They've been consumed
by bacteria, acetic soil, and time. But at noon Alec
because of the deep freeze, the mundane, everyday organic items
of these people were perfectly preserved in the earth alongside them, and.
Speaker 1: The items are so beautifully ordinary, which makes them incredibly poignant.
They recovered wooden paddles intricately carved for navigating the icy
waters and kayaks. They found tightly woven grass baskets, harpoon
heads engineered for seal hunting, and incredibly clothing meticulously stitched
together from bird skins. Bird skins, I try to imagine
the sheer skill and patience required to hunt enough sea birds,
carefully skin them without tearing the delicate tissue, prepare those
skins and stitch them together with sinew to create a
parka that can actually keep a human alive during an
Alaskan winter. It's a masterclass in utilizing every single resource
and unforgiving environment offers every piece of their daily lives,
Their technology, and their art was captured in the ice.
Speaker 2: And while the physical artifacts are breathtaking, the truly profound
aspect of the Nuneallic discovery transcends the material culture. It
lies in the genomic data. Rigorous DNA testing was conducted
on the human remains recovered from this site. The results
provided a definitive, undeniable biological link. The ancestors, Yes, the
individuals buried at Nonelek six thousand years ago are the
direct genetic ancestors of the modern Yuppik and Inuit populations
who inhabit that exact region today.
Speaker 1: The emotional weight of that continuity is staggering. Think about
what it means to have an unbroken lineage spanning six
thousand years, through countless generations, through shifting climatic periods, through
historical upheavals, and through the grueling daily reality of the
Arctic environment. That specific family line has survived, thrived, attained
a continuous cultural and biological presence in one of the
harshest environments on planet Earth. When archaeologists study Nunilec, they
aren't dissecting a lost, mysterious civilization that vanished into the ether.
They are documenting the profound, enduring legacy of a civilization
that is still very much alive, still adapting, and still
living on that land.
Speaker 2: It's a six thousand year unbroken chain, mothers teaching daughters
how to weave those specific baskets, and fathers teaching sons
how to carve those specific paddles.
Speaker 1: It severely challenges the traditional historical narrative that often paints
the Arctic as an empty barren frontier waiting to be
explored or conquered. The data from Nunilek proves it is
a long inhabited homeland with deep, continuous and incredibly resilient roots.
Speaker 2: The techniques for surviving the Arctic, the highly specific thermodynamic
design of their clothing, the deep understanding of marine mammal
migration patterns, the architecture of their shelters. These aren't just
historical curiosities. They represent proven, highly refined survival strategies honed
over millennia, passed down through an unbroken genetic and cultural continuum.
Speaker 1: The intimacy of finding those personal items is incredible. But
there's another frozen civilization story in the sources that takes
that intimacy and adds an eerie, almost macabre layer to it.
We need to travel back to western Siberia, near the
town of Salikart. Here archaeologists uncovered a medieval burial ground
known as Zeleniar.
Speaker 2: Zeleniar a fascinating, fascinating site.
Speaker 1: We are talking about the twelve hundreds, roughly eight hundred
years ago. They excavated forty seven graves in total. Because
these graves were dug into the permafrost, the researchers weren't
just looking at skeletal remains. They were uncovering bodies that
came out of the earth with their skin, their hair,
and their soft tissue largely intact.
Speaker 2: You could literally look at the facial features of people
who walk the earth during the Middle Ages. You could
see the exact garments they were buried in.
Speaker 1: The Zeleni Yar necropolis offers a spectacularly detailed called vistoral
snapshot of medieval Siberian life. The preservation is so comprehensive
that archaeologists can observe the intricate layering of their clothing.
Some individuals were recovered with the thick animal fur still
perfectly preserved underneath their burial wrappings.
Speaker 2: They are interred with their worldly possessions iron blades, specialized tools,
decorative beads, and tailored leather clothing, all sitting right there
alongside the bodies, practically untouched by the eight centuries that
had passed above ground.
Speaker 1: The artifacts are amazing, but the sources point out some
highly specific, mysterious elements to this burial site that suggest
complex spiritual rituals. For one, almost all the bodies were
positioned meticulously with their feet pointing directly toward a nearby river.
That level of uniformity isn't a coincidence, no, definitely intentional.
There had to be a deeply ingrained spiritual or cosmological
reason for that alignment, perhaps a cultural belief that the
river acted as a physical conduit carrying the soul to
the act after life. But the detail that really fascinated
me was what was placed on the bodies. Several of
these individuals, including a remarkably preserved child, had heavy bronze
or copper plates placed directly over their faces, chests, or pelvises.
Speaker 3: The inclusion of.
Speaker 2: Those copper and bronze plates is a fascinating archaeological detail.
Because it sits squarely at the intersection of intentional, spiritual,
ritual and accidental science.
Speaker 1: Accidental science exactly.
Speaker 2: From a cultural and anthropological perspective, these metal plates likely
held immense significance. They might have indicated high social status,
served as protective talismans to ward off malevolent spirits in
the afterlife, or functioned a spiritual currency for the journey ahead.
But from a strict scientific and biological standpoint, the presence
of these specific metals introduces a highly intriguing variable into
the preservation process. Copper and its alloys like bronze, are
well documented for their natural anti microbial properties.
Speaker 1: Wait, are you suggesting the plates actually helped preserve the bodies?
Speaker 2: Isn't highly plausible and a theory seriously considered by researchers.
By placing these copper plates on the deceased for spiritual reasons,
the community may have inadvertently aided the miraculous physical preservation process.
That's wild, The copper ions slowly leaching from the plates
would have actively suppressed the growth of the specific bacteria
and fungi that normally initiate decomposition. This antimicrobial action would
have worked in perfect tandem with the freezing temperatures of
the permafrost, effectively creating an enhanced, localized time capsule around
these specific individuals.
Speaker 1: So their spiritual ritual accidentally hacked the biological decay process.
That is incredible, and just like what the ancient wolves,
the permafrost allowed scientists to perform autopsies on these medieval humans.
The analysis of their stomach and intestinal contents gave researchers
an unprecedented hyperspecific menu of exactly what a Siberian diet
look like eight hundred years ago.
Speaker 2: We are just guessing based on animal bones found nearby.
We can see exactly what they ingested. We can see
their overall health, the specific internal parasites they harbored, and
the local flora and fauna they were consuming just hours
before they died.
Speaker 1: It's a level of intimate historical detail that you simply
cannot extract from reading a heavily biased, generalized medieval manuscript.
Speaker 2: Right we are moving from the abstract macro level of
history to the deeply physical micro level. A historical manuscript
might tell you that a distant king decreed attacks on grain,
or that a specific war disrupted trade roads, but analyzing
the gut contents from a permafrost burial tells you exactly
what a common person was successfully foraging and digesting on
a random Tuesday in the thirteenth century. It provides an unvarnished,
indisputable biological truth about human existence, nutrition, and disease burden
in that specific era.
Speaker 1: I want to shift our focus now, because as much
as the permafrost is a biological time capsule, sometimes the
Earth itself engages in mechanics that seem to completely defy logic.
We are leaving the human graves behind and heading to
the small barred archipelago in Norway, specifically to a rugged
island called Spitzbergen.
Speaker 2: Okay, the geography on this one is mind bending.
Speaker 1: It really is. I want you to visualize this scenario
from the field reports. You are on a geological survey hike.
You are hundreds of meters inland, hiking up a steep, dry, rocky,
mountainous terrain. You are at a significant elevation, nowhere near the.
Speaker 3: Ocean shoreline, nowhere near it.
Speaker 1: And suddenly you stumble over a massive bleached skeletal structure
protruding from the rock. You look closer and you realize
you have just tripped over the colossal ribs and jawbone
of a massive marine whale.
Speaker 2: It is a profoundly disorienting, almost surreal image to encounter
in the field. To find the massive remains of deep
ocean leviathans stranded in high altitude, rocky environments immediately challenges
our basic understanding of geography, and the radiocarbon dating makes
the scenario even more perplexing at first glance. How old
are these aren't recent strandings caused by modern navigational confusion.
These massive bones back anywhere from five thousand to seven
thousand years, So the immediate logical question any observer would
ask is how on Earth did a multi ton marine
mammal end up dying on top of a mountain thousands
of years ago the ancient sea levels fall that drastically
did an unprecedented apocalyptic tsunami physically throw them miles inland?
Speaker 1: I know when I first read that in the sources,
my mind immediately went to some cataclysmic flood scenario like
a megasunami. But the geological truth is actually much more fascinating,
and it has to do with the process called post
glacial rebound. To understand this, we have to stop thinking
of the Earth's crust as a rigid, unmoving shell.
Speaker 2: That's the key.
Speaker 1: Over geological time. The crust and the mantle beneath it
behave more like a highly viscous fluid, like a memory
foam mattress. If you apply an unimaginable amount of weight
to one specific area of the crust, it doesn't just
hold firm, It physically depresses. It sinks down into the mantle.
Speaker 2: That is the crucial concept, and the unimaginable weight in
this geological scenario was the colossal ice sheets of the
Last Ice Age around ten thousand to fifteen thousand years ago.
Regions like the sfal Barred Archipelago were buried beneath glaciers
that were staggeringly massive. We are talking ice sheets that
were kilometers thick kilometer. The sheer unfathomable weight of billions
of tons of dense ice physically compressed the Earth's lithosphere,
pushing the land mass down deeper into the viscous acidosphere
below it.
Speaker 1: So the physical elevation of land itself was drastically lower
because it was quite literally being squished by the weight
of the ice.
Speaker 2: Correct But then the global climate shifted, the ice age waned,
and those colossal glaciers began to rapidly melt and retreat
into the oceans. The massive localized weight was lifted off
the land mass, and because the Earth's mantle is elastic
over long periods, the land, finally free from the crushing
pressure of the ice, began to slowly bounce back up.
Speaker 1: It began to rise, stepping off the memory foam mattress.
Speaker 2: Exactly. This process is known geologically as post glacier rebound
or isostatic adjustment. And the incredible thing that many people
don't realize is that this isn't just ancient geological history.
The mantle is so viscous that the land in these
regions is still actively rising today, thousands of years after
the ice melted.
Speaker 1: So if we apply this mechanics to our stranded whales,
the mystery solves itself beautifully. Five to seven thousand years ago,
a massive whale dies of natural causes, or perhaps gets
disoriented and stranded in shallow coastal waters. It dies and
decomposes on the beach at sea level right But because
of this ongoing post glacial rebound, that specific beach didn't
stay at sea level. Over the next several millennia, the
land continued to slowly, relentlessly rise inch by inch. Year
by year. It lifted that ancient shoreline and the massive
whalebone sitting on it, higher and higher into the air.
Speaker 2: The ocean shoreline essentially crept further and further outward and
downward relative to the rising land mass. What was once
a shallow coastal bay gradually transitioned into an air inland
valley and eventually was pushed up to become elevated mountainous terrain.
The whales didn't climb the mountain, The Earth dynamically reshaped
itself and move the mountain up beneath them.
Speaker 1: It is a striking physical reminder that the ground we
stand on, which feels so permanent and solid to our
fleeting human perspective, is actually incredibly dynamic, fluid, and reactive
on a geological timescale. The earth compresses under burdens, and
it rebounds when they are lifted.
Speaker 3: It's poetic, it is.
Speaker 1: It's such a strange, almost melancholic image to picture these
magnificent deep ocean creatures dying at the edge of the water,
only to be slowly carried up into the dry, freezing
mountains over thousands of years by the sheer slow motion
mechanics of the planet. But as fascinating as the Earth's
geological breathing is, we need to take a significantly darker turn. Now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is where things get serious.
Speaker 1: We've discussed ancient predators, frozen human history, and moving mountains.
Now we have to examine the things locked in the
ice that have the potential to aggressly fight back.
Speaker 2: This is undoubtedly the most critical and alarming aspect of
our discussion today. The permafrost is not just a passive
museum of dead things. It is a highly effective repository
for dormant biology, and that repository includes microscopes, pathogens, bacteria,
and viruses that have been locked away frozen in a
state of metabolic suspension, simply waiting for the right thermal
conditions to wake up and resume replication.
Speaker 1: To truly understand the gravity of this threat, we need
to look at two deeply terrifying case studies detailed in
our sources. First, we are going back to November nineteen eighteen.
Location is a small, incredibly remote Inuit village in Alaska
called Brevig Mission. The year in nineteen eighteen should instantly
trigger alarm bells for anyone familiar with modern history Spanish flu.
It was the devastating peak of the global Spanish flu pandemic.
This horrific virus somehow made its way across the Frasen
landscape to this tiny, isolated village. The devastation was absolute
and unimaginably swift. Within a matter of days, seventy two
out of the eighty villagers were wiped out.
Speaker 2: Unbelievable.
Speaker 1: The handful of survivors were left with the unimaginable, grueling
task of burying in nearly their entire community in a
mass grave dug deep into the unforgiving permafrost.
Speaker 2: It was an absolute tragedy, a brutal, isolated microcosm of
the global horror of the nineteen eighteen flu inflicted which
killed tens of millions worldwide. For decades, that mass grave
at Brevig Mission lay undisturbed in the frozen earth. Meanwhile,
the nineteen eighteen flu strain remained one of the greatest,
most frustrating medical mysteries of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: Because we didn't have a sample of it.
Speaker 2: Exactly, scientists desperately needed to understand its specific genetic makeup
to prevent or mitigate future pandemics. But the virus had
seemingly vanished. It had mutated over decades into less lethal
seasonal strains. We had no original viable samples of the
nineteen eighteen virus to study in a laboratory.
Speaker 1: That remained the case until nineteen ninety seven. Enter a
dedicated pathologist named Johan Holton. He realized that the unique
properties of the permafrost grave that brevig mission might hold
the elusive answer. It's a morbid, deeply unsettling scientific mission.
He travels to Alaska, secures the necessary permissions from the
local community, and opens this eighty year old mass grave.
Speaker 2: He wasn't looking for bones or artifacts.
Speaker 1: He is looking for one very specific microscopic thing, human
lung tissue that might still harbor intact fragments of the
original nineteen eighteen virus RNA. And because the permafrost had
kept the ground completely frozen solid for eight decades, halting
all bacterial decomposition, he found it. One of the victims
buried there had soft lung tissue that was remarkably well preserved.
Speaker 2: Holton carefully removed samples of that lung tissue and securely
transported them to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
What followed was a triumph of modern molecular biology, built
directly upon the tragedy of the past. Using those perfectly
preserved kissue samples, scientists at the CDC embarked on the painstaking,
highly complex process of genetic extraction and sequencing. By two
thousand five, they achieved a monumental breakthrough.
Speaker 1: They successfully reconstructed the complete exact genetic sequence of the
nineteen eighteen H one N one flu virus. They literally
rebuilt the genetic blueprint of the most deadly virus in
modern human history from scratch, using frozen scraps pulled from
the Alaskan dirt. It's incredible science, and when they finally
had that genetic map laid out before them, they solved
a mystery that had baffled doctors and epidemiologists for nearly
a century. See Most typical fleu strands are highly lethal,
primarily to the most vulnerable populations, the very young, the elderly,
and people with compromised immune systems, But the nineteen eighteen
flu was terrifyingly notorious for disproportionately killing healthy young adults
in the absolute prime of their lives. The question was
always why.
Speaker 2: The reconstructed genome provided the chilling, definitive answer. The nineteen
eighteen virus possessed specific, highly aggressive mutations that triggered a
catastrophic overreaction in the human immune system, a severe biological
phenomenon known as a sitekine.
Speaker 1: Storm as cytokine storm.
Speaker 2: In healthy young adults, who possess the most robust and
reactive immune systems, the virus essentially weaponized their own physiological
defenses against them. The virus replicated rapidly in the lungs,
and the strong immune system responded with an overwhelming, unregulated
flood of inflammatory cytokines. This caused the lungs to rapidly
fill with fluid and immune cells in a desperate, chaotic
attempt to fight the infection, ultimately resulting in the patient
essentially drowning from the inside out and their own bodily fluids.
Speaker 1: The tragedy of it is staggering. The very thing that
is supposed to keep you alive, your own strong immune system,
is exactly what the virus uses to kill you. The
stronger you were, the faster you died.
Speaker 2: It is a brutal evolutionary quirk, but understanding that specific
mechanism completely revolutionized modern global pandemic preparation. By knowing exactly
what those deadly mutations look like on a genetic molecular level,
scientists can now actively monitor new emerging flu strains in
animal population.
Speaker 1: So if they see those mutations popping up.
Speaker 2: Again, they notice sound the global alarm and begin vaccine
production immediately. That single tragic mass grave in the permafrost
and the unique preservation it provided has undoubtedly saved countless
lives by handing us the press glueprint of our microscopic enemy.
Speaker 1: So in the case of the nineteen eighteen flu, the
perfrost preservation resulted in a massive medical triumph. We proactively
went in, retrieved the historical data, and utilized it to
protect ourselves. But our next story illustrates the terrifying consequences
of what happens when the ice decides to release its
contents entirely on its own terms.
Speaker 2: This is where the warming really hits home.
Speaker 1: Let's pivot from a hard won medical victory to a
modern horror story. The year is twenty sixteen. We are
back in Russia, specifically on the Yema Peninsula. This particular
summer was unusually warm. The heat waves were unprecedented for
the region, and this caused the active layer of the
permafrost thaw to penetrate much deeper into the earth than
it normally would during a standard summer cycle.
Speaker 2: This specific event is the exact scenario climatologists and epidemiologists
have been anxiously warning us about for decades. The primafrost
is not a static, isolated environment. It is highly reactive
to the atmospheric climate above it.
Speaker 1: When that unprecedented heat penetrated deeper than usual, it reached
something that had been buried and frozen solid for over
seventy five years, the carcass of a reindeer that had
succumbed to a highly infectious brutal disease. And as that
seventy five year old carcass slowly thawed out into the mushy,
wet tundra, a biological trap was sprung. The anthrax spores
that had been dormant inside that dead reindeer for nearly
a century woke up. The results were immediate, chaotic, and devastating.
A young boy living in the area contracted the disease
and tragically died. Dozens of other people in the region
were infected and rushed to hospitals with severe symptoms. Than
the wildlife, the local wildlife and livestock were absolutely decimated.
Around two thy three hundred reindeer dropped dead across the
peninsula in a matter of weeks. Nobody in that specific
region had witnessed an anthrax outbreak in seventy five years.
It was considered a ghost of the past, and suddenly
it was a lethal present reality.
Speaker 2: The underlying biology of the anthrax bacteria Bacillus anthrasis makes
it uniquely and terrifyingly suited for this kind of delayed
action devastation. When anthrax bacteria are exposed to harsh, unfavorable
environmental conditions like freezing temperatures, extreme heat, or a sudden
lack of nutrients, they undergo a process called spoiulation.
Speaker 3: They form spores yes.
Speaker 2: And these spores are essentially impenetrable biological armour. The bacteria
enter a state of extreme metabolic dormancy, becoming incredibly resistant
to heat, freezing cold, ultra violet radiation, and the passage
of time. They can sit in the freezing dark earth
for centuries, completely inactive, just waiting the moment the ambient
temperature rises and the soil becomes saturated with all water.
The spores detect the favorable conditions, break out of their
armoured shells and become highly infectious, rapidly reproducing bacteria.
Speaker 1: Once again, it's the definition of a biological land mine.
A sick animal dies in nineteen forty one, the ground
freezes over it, and you step on that exact spot
seventy five years later, and the land mine still goes off.
Speaker 2: Fortunately, the twenty sixteen ye Meal outbreak was identified and
contained by emergency health services before it escalated into a massive,
uncontrollable regional disaster, but the broader implications of that event
are staggering. This single case got the entire global scientific
community looking at the vast expanse of the Arctic and
asking a very dark question.
Speaker 1: What else is hiding down there?
Speaker 2: And that is the existential question we must all grapple
with as the climate warms. The historical record is clear
there are regions all across Siberia and the global North
where massive die offs of animals and humans from various
highly contigious diseases Anthrax foot and mouth disease and even
smallpox occurred over the past.
Speaker 1: Few centuries, and those bodies weren't incinerated.
Speaker 2: No, those infected carcasses and bodies were rarely incinerated or
properly contained using modern sanitary methods. They were simply buried
in shallow graves in the permafrost because digging deep and
frozen ground is nearly impossible. As the Arctic warms at
an accelerated rate, those shallow graves are the first things
to thaw.
Speaker 1: And it's not just historical bacteria from a few centuries
ago that we need to worry about. The sources outline
how researchers have proactively gone hunting in the deep permafrost
for ancient pathogens, just to see what is possible, and
they found something called a giant virus that is over
forty eight thousand years.
Speaker 2: Old, a giant virus.
Speaker 1: And just to unequivocally prove a point about biological resilience,
they took this forty eight thousand year old virus into
a highly secure biosafety level laboratory and they successfully revived it.
They provided it with host cells, and the virus woke
up completely capable of infecting those cells after being frozen
since the Pleistocene.
Speaker 2: Now it is crucial to clarify that this specific giant virus,
known as a pithovirus, exclusively targets amoebus. It is entirely
harmless to humans and mammals. However, the scientific proof of
concept it provides is terrifying. It definitively confirms that complex
biological entities can remain viable and infectious and permafrost for
tens of thousands of years.
Speaker 1: It raises a profound, alarming biological question.
Speaker 2: The permafrost is not just a passive museum. It is
a dormant biological minefield. What happens when the ice fully
melts our Modern human immune systems are highly adapted to
the specific pathogen circulating in the twenty first century. We
have absolutely zero natural evolutionary immunity to viruses or bacteria
that circulated fifty thousand years ago. If a novel pathogen
that caused a mass extinction event among place to see
megafauna thaws out, washes into the modern water table, and
encounters modern wildlife or human populations, the immunological consequences could
be catastrophic.
Speaker 1: It's a literal Pandora's box made of ice, and every
fraction of a degree the global temperature goes up, the
lid opens a little wider, letting something unknown out into
the air. We love to think of ourselves as so
technologically advanced, so capable of engineering our way out of
whatever nature throws at us. But that brings me perfectly
to our final section.
Speaker 2: Because the permafrost doesn't just reveal nature's ancient secrets and threats,
it exposes our own arrogant modern mistakes exactly.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about some mid century human hubris, starting with
the Cold War. The year is nineteen fifty nine.
Speaker 2: We are at the absolute height of the geopolitical standoff
between the United States and the Soviet Union. The strategic
nuclear maneuvering during this period was intense and often reckless.
The Arctic, being the shortest, most direct flight path for
intercontinental ballistic missiles between the two superpowers, suddenly became a
region of immense paranoid military interest.
Speaker 1: So the US Army decides they need a permanent strategic
foothold in the ice. They deploy to Greenland, and they
begin carving a literal, massive secret military base directly into
the Greenland Ice.
Speaker 3: Sheet.
Speaker 1: They utilize massive rotary snowplows to build miles of trees wrenches,
which they roofed over with steel and snow to create
subterranean tunnels, living quarters, mess halls, and laboratories, all of
it completely submerged and hidden inside.
Speaker 3: Solid ice Camp Century.
Speaker 1: They designated this facility Camp century Now to the global
public and the Danish government. They pitched this as a harmless,
purely scientific research station dedicated to studying extreme weather patterns
and extracting ice core samples. But the declassified sources reveal
the real, deeply classified goal behind the curtain with something
called Project ice Worm, The ultimate staggering plan was to
hide a vast mobile network of hundreds of nuclear missiles
deep under the ice sheet.
Speaker 2: The strategic theory was that this frozen subterranean fortress could
survive a preempt of Soviet nuclear strike and launch a
devastating counter attack from an untrackable location.
Speaker 1: From a purely historical and strategic perspective, the sheer engineering
ambition of Project ice Worm is staggering. They essentially attempted
to construct a self sustaining subterranean city within a dynas
moving glacier. The tunnel network span nearly two miles, and.
Speaker 2: To power this massive, energy hungry underground complex, they didn't
just string up massive extension cords or rely on diesel alone.
They transported and installed a fully functional, portable nuclear reactor
right there inside the ice sheet.
Speaker 1: However, this is precisely where the conflict between arrogant human
engineering and the relentless physical reality of nature comes into
sharp focus, because no matter how much steel you bring,
nature always wins the long game.
Speaker 2: Always.
Speaker 1: They built this incredible, high tech, nuclear powered base, but
they seemingly underestimated one crucial foundational detail of glaciology. Glaciers
are not static rock. Glaciers move, Ice shifts. It flows
like an incredibly slow river. It compresses, and it deforms
under its own massive weight. And within just a few
years of construction, the incredibly immense shifting pressure of the
ice sheet began to literally crush the tunnels of Camp Century.
Speaker 2: The heavy steel beams were bending and snapping, the walls
were visibly closed in, and the structural integrity of the
entire base was critically compromised. By nineteen sixty seven, the
US Army had to wave the white flag. They couldn't
fight the physics of the ice anymore. They evacuated the personnel,
they scrapped Project ice Worm, and they walked away.
Speaker 1: And this is where a historical military failure transitions into
a looming modern environmental crisis. When the military abandoned Camp
Century in nineteen sixty seven, they operated under the assumption
that the immense frozen mass of the Greenland ice sheet
would remain stable and frozen in perpetuity. They believed it
was the ultimate, secure, inescapable garbage dump.
Speaker 2: Consequently, they removed the highly classified nuclear reactor core, but
they left nearly everything else behind in the crushing ice.
They abandoned tens of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel,
highly toxic polychlorinated by phenols PCBs, massive amounts of rock,
human sewage, and thousands of gallons of radioactive coolant water,
all of it just sitting in the collapsing tunnels and
tombed in the ice.
Speaker 1: It was the ultimate out of out of mind philosophy. Well,
fast forward to twenty twenty four. NASA conducts a flyover
of the site using advanced ground penetrating radar imaging and
they pick the entire ruined base back up on their screens.
It's still there, buried under at least one hundred feet
of solid ice and snow.
Speaker 2: But here is the massive ticking time bomb that the
sources explicitly point out. The Arctic, as we established at
the very beginning of this discussion, is warming faster than
anywhere else on the planet. The Greenland ice sheet, which
was supposed to entombe Camp Century's toxic legacy forever, is
actively melting.
Speaker 1: The environmental concern here is no longer a theoretical exercise.
It is an impending reality. As the surface ice above
and around Camp century melts, the structural integrity of that
frasen tomb degrades, the melt water percolates down through the fern.
Speaker 2: Researchers are genuinely, profoundly concerned that in the coming decades,
this increasing volume of melt water will reach those abandoned
degrading steel drums of diesel fuel, the toxic PCBs in
the radioactive waste. If that containment is breached, those highly
dangerous plutants won't just sit there in the ice. They
will be flushed out by the subterranean meltwater rivers directly
into the pristine Arctic ocean environment. Bioaccumulating in the marine
food web and poisoning the local ecosystem.
Speaker 1: It is a stark, undeniable lesson in human hubris, the
arrogant assumption that we can use the environment as an immutable,
permanent disposal tool without ever considering the long term geological
and climatic consequences of our actions.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate consequence of short term thinking. We tried
to weaponize the ice, and now the ice is threatening
to weaponize our own toxic trash against US.
Speaker 1: Okay, to conclude our historical guys today, I want to
pivot from mid century military failures to the ultimate Arctic
maritime mystery. This is a story of grand exploration, horrific tragedy,
and arguably the most eerie, unsettling preservation we've discussed yet.
We are going back to the year eighteen forty.
Speaker 2: Five, the Franklin Expedition.
Speaker 1: Sir John Franklin, a highly seasoned and respected British explorer,
takes command of two magnificent, heavily fortified ships, the HMS
Arabis in the HMS Terror and sails north from England.
His mission is the holy grail of nineteenth century naval
exploration to finally find and successfully navigate the Northwest Passage,
a hypothetical sea route through the treacherous Arctic archipelago connecting
the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Speaker 2: The Franklin Expedition is one of the most enduring dark
legends of maritime history. They departed with state of the
art ships equipped with early steam engines, massive provisions meant
to last over three years, and an experienced, confident crew
of one hundred and twenty nine men, and then they
simply vanished into the unforgiving white expanse.
Speaker 1: For over a century and a half, their precise fate
was the subject of endless frantic speculation, numerous failed rescue
missions that cost even more lives, and chilling local Inuit
folklore regarding starving men walking across the ice. They were
entirely swallowed.
Speaker 2: By the Arctic for one hundred and sixty eight years.
Speaker 1: It was a ghost story until recently, when the ice
finally decided to give them back. In twenty fourteen, underwater
search teams utilizing advanced sonar and guided by traditional Inuit
knowledge found the wreck of the HMS Arabis near King
William Island, and then two years later, in September twenty sixteen,
they located the HMS Terror. Now I want you to
consider the reality of finding a wooden sailing ship that
has been lost, crushed, and submerged in the brutal ice
of the Arctic for nearly one hundred and seventy years.
Speaker 2: You would logically expect to find nothing more than a
debris field of rotting splinters scattered across the seafloor.
Speaker 1: Right exactly. That would be the completely logical assumption for
a wooden shipwreck in almost any other body of water
on Earth, A wooden vessel from eighteen forty five sunken
in the Atlantic, the Caribbean, or the Pacific would be
heavily deteriorated, if not entirely consumed by wood boring marine organisms,
heavily battered by deep ocean currents, and broken down by
oxygenated decay.
Speaker 2: But when the researchers located the HMS Terror in Terror Bay,
sitting in about twenty four meters of water, the visual
evidence completely defied every standard expectation of marine archaeology.
Speaker 1: The ship wasn't smashed to pieces by the shifting pack ice,
it wasn't scattered across miles of ocean floor. It was
sitting completely upright, proud on the ocean floor, looking almost
ready to sail. We know from historical reconstruction that the
crew had gotten hopelessly locked in the sea ice in
eighteen forty six, endured two horrific winters, and finally abandoned
the ships in a desperate, doomed attempt to walk out
to civilization. In eighteen forty eight, every single man died.
So the terror had been sitting alone, slowly sinking into
the dark water for over a century and a half.
Speaker 2: The researchers sent these remote operated vehicles RVs down into
the freezing water to swim around and actually navigate inside
the ship, and the video footage they recovered the cognitive
distance of seeing it is staggering. It is a literal
ghost ship.
Speaker 1: The visual data captured by those RVs is astounding and
incredibly haunting. The preservation is so immaculate that the fragile
glass is still fully intact in many of the ship's windows.
Speaker 2: Inside the pantry and storage areas, ceramic plates and glass
bottles are still sitting neatly stacked on their shelves, exactly
as they were stowed in the eighteen forties when they
carefully navigated the rov into the captain's cabin. They found
his wooden desk with the drawers completely closed and secure.
Speaker 1: It did not look like a shipwreck that had endured
nearly two centuries of a harsh, grinding marine environment. It
looked frozen in time.
Speaker 2: It looks like the crew just stepped out onto the
ice for a moment and forgot to come back. You
can almost feel the heavy silence and the presence of
the men who lived, suffered, and died there.
Speaker 1: But physically, how is that possible? How does a wooden
ship survive that flawlessly underwater?
Speaker 2: It comes down to the bizarre extreme physical and biological
parameters of Arctic water. That deep water in Terror Bay
is profoundly cold, hovering near freezing year round. Furthermore, it
is incredibly deprived of oxygen. The combination of ex stream
perpetual cold and an ocqusic or low oxygen environment creates
a habitat that is deeply hostile to the normal agents
of decay.
Speaker 1: The bacteria can't survive.
Speaker 2: Exactly, specifically, the microorganisms the fungui and the specialized wood
boring mollusks like shipworms that would rapidly devour the wooden
timbers of a sunken ship in warmer waters simply cannot
survive or reproduce in those conditions. The Arctic water acted
as a massive liquid preservative, sealing the HMS terror in
a state of suspended animation, just as effectively, albeit through
different mechanics, as the permafrost preserved the Tuo Mott puppies
and the Siberian humans.
Speaker 1: It all comes back to that freezer door we talked
about at the beginning. The environment is the ultimate curator.
So let's bring this incredible, sprawling journey to a close.
Today we have unpacked the profound, dual nature of the
Arctic ice. It is, without a doubt, the ultimate historian.
It has flawlessly preserved the literal DNA of extinct giants
like the wooly rhino in the mammoth.
Speaker 2: It has protected the intricate tools, the clothing, and the
ancestral legacy of ancient humans surviving against all odds. It
has kept a haunting, pristine vigil over lost explorers in
perfectly preserved ghost ships.
Speaker 1: And terrifyingly, it has locked away the DNA of deadly
viruses and the toxic waste of our own geopolitical conflicts.
It's a vast, silent vault of miracles, tragedies and nightmares.
Speaker 2: And the looming reality that must underscore all of this
scientific wonder is that the vault is actively aggressively opening.
The unprecedented warming of our global climate is turning ancient
history into a very present, highly unpredictable reality. The ice
is melting, the ground is literally shifting beneath our feet.
And as we saw with the Anthrax outbreak and the
creeping thread of Camp Sentries waste, this is not just
an academic exercise.
Speaker 1: The contents of this time capsule have the power to
profoundly impact our modern world, our ecosystems, and our health,
for better or for worse. The history isn't just sitting there.
It's waking up. But before we sign off, I want
to leave you, you the listener, with a new thought
to chew on, something that builds on everything we've discussed today.
Speaker 2: Okay, late on us.
Speaker 1: We talked about extracting the complete genome of the wooly
rhino from that wolf pup, and we talked about reviving
forty eight thousand year old viruses. This brings up the
incredibly controversial field of de extinction.
Speaker 3: Ah.
Speaker 2: Yes, as the permafrost hands us the perfect genetic blueprints
of these lost place to see creatures, we are rapidly
approaching the technological capability to clone them and bring them back.
So my question to you is do we have the
right to play place to sne gods?
Speaker 1: That is the big question.
Speaker 2: Just because the ice preserved the blueprint doesn't mean we
should rebuild the animal. If we bring back a mammoth,
where does it live in a warming world? And who
actually owns the genetic rights to a biological marvel pulled
from the fawing international ice. We want to know where
you stand on the ethics of this frozen frontier. Leave
a comment and let us know what you think. It
is a profound ethical question that requires deep, critical things
from all of us as the line between the past
and the present continues to blur in this warming world.
Thank you for exploring these complex and fascinating realities with us.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on this edition of Thrilling Friends.
Keep questioning, keep exploring, and remember sometimes the most important
history isn't written in a book. It's the history that's
currently thawing out right beneath our feet. See you next time.