When a mammoth that has been frozen for 30,000 years in northern Canada is discovered, will an ancient virus within the permafrost take the opportunity to awaken?
Why is mammoth discovered, and is its appearance a warning?
What's going on here?
Is it a thankful thing for us?
CNN reported on June 26, 2022, that Canada found a mummy of a small mammoth that had been frozen for more than 30,000 years in a gold mining area.
This is the first nearly intact mammoth mummy found in North America to date, thrilling all experts.
On Twitter, geomorphologist Dan Schuka described the baby elephant this way, calling its toenails, skin, hair, torso and intestines "unbelievably intact."
He wrote: "This is the most exciting scientific project I have ever been involved in, not one of them. ”
It is understood that the mummy was found in the traditional territory of Trendek Hervechin, when miners in the Klondike region of Canada were looking for gold in the permafrost.
Paleontologists have also identified this as a 30,000-year-old mammoth, and the 1.4-meter-long female mammoth cub was only about 1 month old when she died, about 4.2 million years ago.
Scientists named it "Nun cho ga," which means "big baby animal."
The most special thing about it is that its body is too well preserved in the frozen soil. In short, it was like just dying.
I think everyone has a certain understanding of mammoths, even if you don't understand it, it doesn't matter, I will answer for you.
Mammoth is a prehistoric creature, also known as the mammoth, is a phylum of chordates, a subphylum of vertebrates, mammals, a suborder of euphrasiaceae, a suborder proboscis, a genus of mammoths that adapt to cold climates.
Once one of the largest elephants in the world and one of the largest mammals that have ever survived on land, the steppe mammoth weighs up to 12 tons. It is a giant of the Ice Age.
The first mammoth artificial traps recorded around the world were on November 6, 2019.
Mammoth remains found in an artificial trap in Turtepec, Mexico.
So what caused the mammoth to go extinct?
First, changes in the environment; This kind of belongs to nature's law of elimination, not unfairness to mammoths.
A similar situation occurred at the end of the Tertiary Period of the Cenozoic Era, when a large number of primitive mammals went extinct.
They were replaced by the ancestors of modern animals, or because of rising temperatures at the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.
Mammoths, which originally lived in grasslands and fed on grass, were forced to migrate because of temperature, and on their way to farther north, where temperatures were lower, they starved to death or died of disease.
It can be said that when the mammoth began to go extinct, the last ice age began to come to an end.
Second, inbreeding; In April 2014, new research pointed out that some unusual features on mammoth fossils excavated from the North Sea suggested that 10,000 years ago, inbreeding may have accelerated the extinction of mammoths.
Since the population has decreased, mammoths have begun to breed inbreeding.
Frietson Galis, a paleontologist at the Natolis Centre for Biodiversity in Leiden, the Netherlands, describes the vicious circle of inbreeding and its vulnerability as a "vortex of extinction".
Because in the new habitat, mammoths no longer live in groups as they once did, even if most of the people they live with are close relatives.
Third, the hunting and killing of ancient humans; In the history of human evolution, humans made winter clothes from the fur of mammoths.
Originally, the two sides could coexist peacefully, but when human beings learned a lot of knowledge in the process of evolution.
As a result, mammoths became their targets over time, mammoths were a source of meat for humans at the time, and mammoth tusks could be used to make weapons such as spears.
Studies have shown that the 10,000-year-old mammoth full thaw period is completely extinct, and humans may have played an important role in this.
Mammoth fossils have been dug up in a former swamp fossil site in France, marking the end of the Quaternary Ice Age.
But do you really think it's a good thing that frozen mammoths appear?
Not really.
This means that the Earth's surface will become hotter and hotter, causing the Arctic permafrost to melt rapidly, especially in the summer in the Northern Hemisphere, where there will be massive melting.
Once the permafrost melts, not only will we see mammoths frozen in the permafrost, but there will also be many extinct animals.
Another point we must be clear, the frozen soil is not only animals, but also a variety of viruses and bacteria, they have a "tenacious" vitality, as long as the permafrost melts, then it means that these viruses and bacteria will awaken, may once again plague the human world.
So at this point, we have to be vigilant.
So the question is, can mammoths be revived with our current technology?
With current technology, we can get mammoths by cloning. But we can't go against the grain, and even if we want to revive mammoths, it will cost a lot.
This is especially true in terms of eating, and if you open "WOW Wonder World: Prehistoric Animals", you can see that mammoths eat about 225 kilograms of plants every day. For example, the imperial mammoth is the larger of the mammoths, reaching a height of up to 4.2 meters.
Compared to other animals that lived during the Ice Age, the tall body of the Imperial Mammoth really has the majestic Imperial Wind as they are named.
Due to their large size, the Imperial Mammoth eats 300 kilograms of food every day. And in the face of such a high cost, there is really no need.
Remember a quote from the Russian official Nikolai Kortyunov? He said that the melting of the permafrost could lead to the resurrection of ancient viruses and bacteria, posing an extreme threat to human beings.
If the temperature is getting higher and higher, then the permafrost layer will melt faster, so at this time we have to be vigilant.