Bacteria can clean their feathers at -20 degrees. This makes them even angrier.
There are many cold places on our planet with all sorts of glaciers, icebergs and other snow. Such natural refrigerators occupy about 13% of the Earth's surface. Prehistoric microbes are stored in these freezers. Climate change can melt the ice, and then the ancient microbes will break free.
If these are some kind of antediluvian bacteria that have been sleeping for millions of years, then they may not understand from which side to start eating people. They had never met people before. And this is good.
On the other hand, if you start treating such an infection with antibiotics, then it is not a fact that modern drugs will work on prehistoric microbes. So it's better not to hit them.
Anthrax and flu
Most of the horror stories about thawed microbes are associated with some kind of burial in the permafrost. All sorts of century-old viruses or anthrax that someone accidentally dug up. This is understandable, but not the most interesting. Everything is more cunning there.
They don't freeze
The bacteria do not need to thaw. They live not only at positive temperatures. Scientists have found signs of viable microbes in various glaciers and on polar expeditions. That is, they dug up colonies of microorganisms that look like they are quietly living their lives.
It turns out that microbes can have metabolism at temperatures of -10 or even -15 degrees.
It's all because of liquid water.
In the very permafrost where sick reindeer are buried, about 3% of the water remains liquid. This is a physical phenomenon that is associated with soil particles, high pressure and various salts dissolved in water.
There is evidence that DNA and protein synthesis can occur even at -60 degrees. That is, slightly frozen microbes may well maintain a minimum metabolism and remain alive.
They look like zombies
It may seem only at first glance that microbes vegetate there. In the cold, bacteria certainly do not multiply. But they do not have mutations and other errors in DNA that occur during growth and reproduction. Old glacial microbes preserve their hereditary information and remain as efficient as in their younger years.
They don't die yet. Well, that is, when an ordinary bacterium dies, it will literally fall apart, and its DNA will be digested by special enzymes. But in the cold, these enzymes do not work, and the DNA remains intact.
Moreover, soil particles in a clever way stabilize the free floating bacterial DNA. That is, mother earth itself protects this muck.
So it turns out that the microbe burst like a balloon, but managed to send its DNA to friends and relatives. His fellow tribesmen bathe in such DNA. This is a real library for them.
Microbes can read someone else's DNA. Our native modern microbes like diphtheria bacillus and staphylococcus in the same way receive instructions from fellow tribesmen, learn how to make poisonous toxins or antidotes for antibiotics.
In the same way, microbes imprisoned in ice, without getting out of the glacier anywhere and without attending school, receive clues from their dead cousins and can learn to attack a mammoth, woolly rhino or cave human.
Personally, I would not want such a thawed relict dirty trick to start testing its secret tricks on me. Maybe I'm not that far from that caveman, and the cave bacteria will devour me alive.
What is it all for
Everyone knows not to eat yellow snow. It turns out that white snow is also undesirable.
If you put a piece of beef in the freezer, don't expect all the germs to die in it. So only worms can be frozen, but bacteria will remain.
And, of course, don't dig burial grounds in the tundra. There you can find yourself dangerous adventures to that very place.
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