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The Rothera station leader said: “We have a contingency plan down here to survive for a number of years, but I do not think it is going to come to that and the whole planet would have to be in a very poor place before that situation would arise.”
Anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 people reside throughout the year at research stations owned by different nations that are scattered across the continent.
The study's authors warn that ice melt "will release glacial microbes and viruses that have been trapped and preserved for tens to hundreds of thousands of years."
We know the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, while ice sheets across the planet have shown consistent thinning linked to climate change and changing weather patterns.
The last two months have seen Antarctica break its record for ice melt—it was reported that 15 percent of the continent's surface melted on Christmas Eve—and record warm water under its most precarious glacier, the Thwaites glacier.
Early this year, researcher Zhi-Ping Zhong and a team of researchers discovered 33 viral populations within two ice cores that had been extracted from the Guliya ice cap in the northwestern part of the Tibetan Plateau, in the Kunlun Mountains of northwestern China. The ice dates as far back as 15,000 years ago. All but five of the viral groups are new to science, and about half were predicted to have infected different strains of bacteria, which were also abundant in the ice.
The Tibetan Plateau is a vast, high altitude arid grassland home to species like the snow leopard, Tibetan wolf, and wild yak. It is surrounded by some of the world’s highest mountain chains including the Himalayas, the Qilian and Kunlun mountains, and the Karakoram range of northern Kashmir. Shadowed by the world’s two highest peaks, Mount Everest and K2, at an elevation that averages over 4,500 meters, the Tibetan Plateau is known to many as “the roof of the world.”
To climate scientists, however, the Tibetan Plateau and its crown of peaks is known as “The Third Pole,” since it is home to tens of thousands of glaciers containing the world’s largest non-polar reservoir of ice. These glaciers feed the most renowned Asian rivers, including the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, and Ganges which stretch thousands of kilometers into the arid regions of China and Pakistan and supply water to almost a third of the world’s population.
And then there is this little-known fact: Some Chinese researchers are in the habit of selling their laboratory animals to street vendors after they have finished experimenting on them.
You heard me right.
Instead of properly disposing of infected animals by cremation, as the law requires, they sell them on the side to make a little extra cash. Or, in some cases, a lot of extra cash. One Beijing researcher, now in jail, made a million dollars selling his monkeys and rats on the live animal market, where they eventually wound up in someone’s stomach.
originally posted by: FredT
I think its more of a climate change as caused by our massive overpopulation than anything else
originally posted by: Gothmog
If you brought every single man woman and child in the world together in Texas there would still be over 1' of space around each.