Ain’t no mountain high enough — to keep germs from getting to you.
Humans aren’t the only organisms to scale the world’s tallest mountain: An analysis of soil samples taken from Mount Everest revealed that our coughs and sneezes are getting preserved in the mountain’s ice for hundreds of years. The alarming findings were published recently in the interdisciplinary journal “Arctic, Antarctic and Alpine Research.“
“There is a human signature frozen in the microbiome of Everest, even at that elevation,” Steven Schmidt, lead author and microbial ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a press release. “If somebody even blew their nose or coughed, that’s the kind of thing that might show up.”
Scientists had harvested the mountaineering microbes during the 2019 National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet expedition to Everest, which is the world’s highest peak, standing at 29,031 feet above sea level. These veritable sneeze freezes were collected from the South Col, a 26,000-foot-tall gap where mountaineers stop off before trying to reach the rooftop of the world.
Scientists then sequenced the genetic material in the flu-print, marking the first time the tech had been used to analyze soil samples from such a high elevation. Using this method, researchers were able to identify strains of Staphylococcus and Streptococcus bacteria that commonly reside in our skin and mouths.
Scientists were flabbergasted that organisms associated with wet, moist environments could potentially survive for centuries in cold, dry and other harsh conditions like a microbial Frosé. In other words, it was a case of a cold catching a cold.
Researchers suspect that it was humans that likely gave Everest the cooties. Indeed, most of the samples were collected around 558 feet away from where hundreds of sneezing, snuffling mountain climbers stop off each year before attempting to summit the world’s tallest peak, Science Alert reported.
The team theorized in the study that South Col and other high-altitude environs could serve as “deep-freeze collection points” for “human-borne contaminants that may never leave once they arrive.”
“We predict that if we sampled in the more human-utilized areas on the mountain we may find even more microbial evidence of human impact on the environment,” the scientists added. These numbers could potentially increase amid the record-setting numbers of climbers returning to Everest in the post-pandemic era.
Alpine pilgrimages aren’t the only factors in the germ-ination of Mount Everest. Researchers predict that previously dormant bacteria could become more active in the future due to the mountain’s warming air temperatures, which are rising an average of 0.33 C per decade.
While the peak proliferation of germs shouldn’t adversely affect Everest, the phenomenon demonstrates the potential of certain microbes to thrive under inhospitable conditions.
When extrapolated out to an even larger scale, the findings could potentially have scary, “War Of The Worlds”-esque implications on our plans to colonize space.
“We might find life on other planets and cold moons,” said Schmidt. “We’ll have to be careful to make sure we’re not contaminating them with our own.”
This isn’t the first time human pathogens have been found in unlikely places.
In a phenomenon seemingly ripped from a Sci-Fi horror movie, French scientists revived a “zombie virus” that had been trapped under a frozen Siberian lake for a record 50,000 years.