Last summer, in the Swiss Alps, I attended the awards ceremony for the Frontiers Planet Prize, which gives a million dollars to environmental-research projects. One finalist caught my eye: a Polish microbiologist who tracked microbes escaping from glaciers as they melted. These bugs had genes that could evade antibiotic drugs, and she warned that they might pass genetic instructions to other bacteria, creating antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
It sounded like the plot of a science-fiction novel. But it also made me realize that, for most of my life, when I worried about climate change, I was mainly thinking about polar bears floating on shards of ice, or bees dying off in droves before they could pollinate plants. As global temperature and weather patterns shift, however, there was clearly another category of affected organisms that had escaped my attention: microbes, the most dominant life-form on earth.
Some microbes make us sick. Many others help our bodies to function, and keep the planet running, too. Microbes create oxygen in the atmosphere, decompose waste material, and help plants absorb nutrients. Plus, they are master adapters. If the ecosystems they live in are changing, they will too—much faster and much better than humans do.
For almost a year, I set out to learn how climate change is transforming the microbial world. Sometimes, a warming planet means that a microbe will become more dangerous to humans. Pathogens like the “flesh-eating” bacteria, Vibrio vulnificus, are becoming more abundant, because they thrive in warmer water. Fungi, meanwhile, prefer to grow at cooler temperatures, meaning that humans are largely protected from fungal disease, because of how hot our bodies are. As the climate gets warmer, however, some fungi may have the chance to overcome that temperature barrier. And many other beneficial and innocuous microbes will adapt too, with unknown, and far-reaching, effects. “Our planet is the test tube,” one biologist told me. “We make it a bit warmer, everything will change.”
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