A very cold environment, away from light and humidity, where the frozen soft tissues survive the years remaining intact: with its very special storage conditions, permafrost is a safe with unique properties.
“These are conditions that are similar to what we are trying to produce in the laboratory to preserve ancient DNA,”
says Régis Debruyne, paleogeneticist at the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN). And, as these frozen soils recede, they release these treasures of a world thought to be extinct, but which had literally stood there frozen for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years.
“Roughly, we can go back more than two million years, to the beginning of the last great ice ages,
explains Régis Debruyne.
But the best-known permafrosts are much more recent and cover the last 120,000 years. ”
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The thaw of "permafrost", a climate bomb still poorly quantified
The Earth was then much less hospitable than today and immense
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