The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

Rock is a record of planetary history, eras as long as millions of years flattened by the forces of geological time into strata with amplitudes of just inches, or just an inch, or even less. Ice works that way, too, as a climate ledger, but it is also frozen history, some of which can be reanimated when unfrozen. There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years—in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice. Already, in laboratories, several microbes have been reanimated: a 32,000-year-old “extremophile” bacteria revived in 2005, an 8-million-year-old bug brought back to life in 2007, a 3.5-million-year-old one a Russian scientist self-injected, out of curiosity, just to see what would happen. (He survived.) In 2018, scientists revived something a bit bigger—a worm that had been frozen in permafrost for the last 42,000 years.