After 30,000 years, a giant virus has been brought back to life from the Siberian permafrost; a layer of permanently frozen soil that rings the Arctic. After isolating the microbe and sequencing its DNA, it was classified to the genus pithovirus; a giant virus group which shares only a third of its genes with any known organisms and only 11 percent of its genes with other viruses.
Photography by Anton Corbijn for the Echo and the Bunnymen’s album The Game
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