One fact that stood out to us was “in 2016, a boy was killed and twenty others infected by anthrax released when retreating permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the bacteria at least seventy-five years earlier; more than two thousand present-day reindeer died.”

This disturbance is attributable to climate change due to global warming. There are bacteria that once existed in our past that are not present in our current society but exist, frozen or ‘trapped’ as Wallace-Wells describes it, in Arctic ice. Due to the amount of time the bacteria and diseases have remained frozen our current human immune systems are not prepared to fight against them and will be susceptible to them when this ice inevitably unfreezes. In most cases, these organisms don’t usually survive after the ice has melted. A lot of times, these diseases have been brought back and investigated in labs, but in this scenario, it was a completely natural occurrence. The boy had no control over this situation, which is alarming because it is a direct effect of climate change and it is scary because people cannot see these diseases and we aren’t used to having to deal with them.

This fact emphasizes our vulnerability to these diseases that we are not prepared to fight. One possible result from climate change could be an increasing amount of pandemics around the world. If we are unprepared to fight these diseases, or not familiar with them, then this could be fatal because global warming has caused ice to melt, which could result in the resurfacing of diseases. It will be difficult to stay ahead of these illnesses and fight them when they are not ones that people have been exposed to. 

Emily Brunelli and Maia Brams