Situated on a Canadian body of land known as Ellesmere Island, Lake Hazen is drop-for-drop the largest freshwater lake in the High Arctic. While its surface area is surpassed in size by Lake Taymyr in Russia and Lake Inari in Finland, it contains more water than either of those bodies, owing its mammoth volume in large part to the numerous glaciers that feed it. Yet as climate change worsens, increased glacial melt — the kind that is causing glaciers from Mount Everest to Africa to disappear altogether — is going to spur all kinds of natural disasters. The most obvious one is sea level rise: for instance, the glaciers in the Greenland Ice Sheet just east of Lake Hazen are currently melting so dramatically that experts believe they could cause a mass rise in sea level displacing as much as 40% of the population.
As Mann put it, "there are actually a variety of mechanisms by which climate change could increase the spread of novel pathogens, of which this is just potentially one."
