THE ZOMBIE VIRUS HUNTERS

Thanks to rising temperatures and melting permafrost, certain ancient viruses are resurfacing but just how dangerous to humans are they? 

- SIMON USBORNE

THERE’S a yellow biohazard danger sign on the door, alongside the logo for the Back to the Future film. This is the lab where French research scientist Jean-Michel Claverie does the work that might one day save humankind from another devastating pandemic.

He reaches into a freezer and pulls out a small plastic bag containing what looks like the damp remains of a sandcastle. It is in fact thawed Siberian permafrost.

Jean-Michel (73) had to go to great lengths to collect this sample. It took days, several flights and a ride in a rickety boat made from old war plane parts to reach the banks of the Kolyma river west of Chersky, a remote town not far from the East Siberian Sea. Once a transit hub for Soviet Gulags, Chersky and its river had become a magnet for scientists trying to unearth secrets from the frozen deep.

At a tight bend in the river he set up a makeshift research station inside a tent and from there, he and a small team began removing soil from the steep- sided riverbank to expose earth that has been frozen for 30 000 years.

A layer of this hardened soil and sand, known as permafrost, lies beneath the earth’s surface across vast areas of the northern hemisphere, largely in Arctic regions of Russia, Scandinavia and North America. In places such as Chersky, the permafrost stays below freezing even while the summers are hot and the surface landscape verdant. In some Arctic regions, life in this layer has been suspended for around 700 000 years.

But climate change and rising temperatures mean permafrost is now thawing. As a result, powers including Russia, China and the US are stepping up efforts to drill and dig through it in pursuit of precious metals and fossil fuels.