The Arctic also stores terrifying diseases from more recent times. In Alaska, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu that infected as many as 500 million, and killed as many as 50 million—about 3 percent of the world’s population, and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. Scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, among many other diseases that have otherwise passed into human legend—an abridged history of devastating sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic
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