The Rising Sea

40

The Earth Studies Lab filled the basement of the main NUMA building in Washington, D.C. It was located down there for purely practical reasons. Being an experimental facility, it took up a lot of space and contained bulky equipment, including large tanks filled with water, sand, clay and various other soils.

Conducting tsunami studies, seismic analyses and erosion experiments meant that sections of the lab were subjected to artificial earthquakes, weather and flooding and no one wanted overflow from the latest rogue wave simulation dripping down through the ceiling above them.

As Rudi Gunn stepped from the elevator and onto the laboratory floor, he was careful to look for puddles. He found none and made his way to the geology department, where two of NUMA’s best had been working through the night and into the morning. He arrived first at the desk of Robert Henley.

Henley was one of the marine geologists who worked under Paul. Thin and ghostly pale, Henley wore his blond hair long and his beard even longer. It gave him the look of an emaciated Nordic prince.

“Morning, Henley.”

“Is it?” Henley asked. “I’d hoped it was still dark outside.”

“Sun’s just coming up. I was glad to get your message when I arrived. So you and Priya have something to show me.”

“We think we know where the influx of water is coming from.”

“That’s good news,” Rudi said.

Henley looked grim. “You’d better hold off on that until you hear the details,” he said. “I’ll let Priya explain. It was her theory that we’ve been following.”

Henley reached over to an intercom button and pressed it. “Rudi’s here,” he said. “Ready to tell him what we’ve found?”

“Be right there,” an English voice replied.

As Henley straightened some papers on his desk, Rudi caught sight of Priya Kashmir approaching.

Priya was Indian, born in Mumbai but had grown up in London. She’d spent a year at Oxford before transferring to MIT. She had dark eyes, high cheekbones and full lips. Her mahogany-colored hair was cut to shoulder length at the moment, while a tiny diamond stud rested on the right side of her nose where she’d recently had it pierced.

It would have been easy to describe her as beautiful. Easy and a disservice. While she had classic features and an alluring smile, her beauty was secondary to her intellect and perhaps third in comparison to her determination.

Priya had graduated in the top of her class at MIT while building a foundation to bring learning material to poor children in rural India. She’d been quite an athlete as well, running track and swimming competitively while finishing her Master’s.

Rudi had hired her after a single interview and she’d been several weeks from joining NUMA when a terrible car crash had damaged her spine. Five surgeries and six months of painful rehabilitation had been unable to restore her mobility — though she had regained some feeling in her toes and that gave her hope.

Given the choice to come aboard or continue her rehab, she’d taken Rudi’s offer to start working and had spent most her time in Hiram Yaeger’s computer lab. She’d shown a great ability to focus on things others overlooked and, for that reason, Rudi had assigned her to work with the geology team in Paul’s absence.

She came around the corner, propelling herself forward in a compact wheelchair. It was a product of her own design, modeled after the athletic wheelchairs used in sporting activities and moved by her own strength instead of a battery pack.

She rolled up to Rudi and Henley, wearing a sleeveless gray top and blue jeans. Henley couldn’t take his eyes off her. Something Priya did not miss. “What are you staring at, Robert?”

“Sorry,” Henley said. “I can’t decide what I’m more envious of, your perfect tan or your muscular arms.”

Priya broke into a surprised smile. “Nicest compliment I’ve heard in ages. The tan comes from Mum and Dad. The biceps are all mine. Push yourself around in one of these for a while and you’ll be buff before you know it.”

“I’d never make it out of the room,” Henley said. “My arms are like wet noodles.”

Rudi cleared his throat and got everyone’s attention. “I understand you two have found something.”

“Yes,” Priya said. “But I’m not certain it will be welcome news.”

“I warned him,” Henley added.

“Feelings can wait,” Rudi said. “We need answers. What have you got?”

Priya moved to a new position. “It starts with what we haven’t found. The first possibility was a subsurface aquifer that the Chinese had ruptured. It would have to be incredibly large and under massive pressure to cause the geyser field that Paul and Gamay recorded. Hard to hide such a thing. We looked at a pair of sub-bottom profiling studies done by the Japanese. The coverage area doesn’t extend much into the Chinese side, but nothing in the study indicates a major pool of pressurized water beneath the continental shelf. So we went deeper.”

Henley took it from there. “We ‘borrowed’ some data from an oil exploration company that charted the region several years ago. Before the price of oil crashed, everyone was looking for deepwater wells. This company took it to an extreme. They were looking for hydrocarbon deposits, several miles below the seabed. The kind that can’t be extracted profitably unless the price of oil is through the roof. A hundred and fifty dollars a barrel or more.”

“And?”

“No oil,” Henley said. “Only a few small natural gas deposits on the Chinese side.”

“What about water?” Rudi asked.

“No water either, but they did find a complex series of vertical fractures running deep into the crust, well beyond the range of the survey.”

“Vertical fractures?”

“Of a type I’ve never seen before,” Henley admitted. “Nothing in the geology database matches them. It’s like the survey found a new type of rock. Interesting in its own right but not an ocean of freshwater.”

“That made us look even deeper,” Priya said. “And it got me thinking about ways to study what was down there without needing to send an ROV to the bottom. We settled on looking for Kenzo’s Z-waves. And we found them. Apparently, some of the more advanced seismic monitoring stations are equipped to detect them, but the computer programs they run on have been filtering the data out.”

“Why?”

“Because the pattern they produce is identical to the signal generated by a deep-earth mining system using high-intensity sound waves.”

“Mining?”

Priya nodded.

“So that’s what the Chinese have been doing down there.”

“So it appears,” Priya said. “But I’m afraid that’s not the most interesting or stunning news. Once we got ahold of the raw, unfiltered data and ran it through a program that Robert designed, we were able to determine the depth and orientation of the Z-waves. What we found was incredible. The Z-waves are propagating vertically, down into the crust and back up.”

“How deep do they go?” Rudi asked.

Henley answered. “Through the crust and the upper mantle, into an area known as the transition zone. At least two hundred two hundred miles below the surface. At the bottom of the transition zone, the Z-waves are reflected back off the denser rock and bounced back up to the surface, creating a harmonic vibration on the way in and the way out. And that tremor is wreaking havoc on a particular type of mineral within the transition zone.”

“What kind of mineral?”

“Ever heard of ringwoodite?”

“Ring-wood-ite?” Rudi shook his head. “No.”

“It’s a crystalline mineral similar to olivine that forms only under intense pressure. It’s found deep in the transition zone beneath the upper mantle. In 2014, geologists studying a diamond that had been brought to the surface by a volcanic eruption discovered a sample of ringwoodite trapped within it. To their surprise, the strange mineral was not alone; it was concealing a special form of water.”

Priya finished for him. “This led to another study. One to determine how much ringwoodite was present in the mantle and how much of that contained water. The teams that worked on it used seismic activity as their ultrasound generators and measured the results over a period of months. They discovered that the entire transition zone, one hundred and fifty miles thick, is permeated with ringwoodite and most of that is trapping water. It’s normally held there under the intense pressure, capped by the rock layers above. Something like carbonated water in a soda bottle. But the Chinese mining effort has fractured the rock all the way down to the transition zone, breaking the cap and releasing the pressure.”

“And thus releasing the water,” Rudi said, grasping the rest of the argument. “Which is forcing its way up through the crust under all that pressure. That would explain the field of geysers we’ve seen. And it might give us a clue how to stop it or how bad it’s going to get. I’m not sure why you’re so glum, I don’t consider this bad news at all.”

“Perhaps you should,” Henley said. “This isn’t an oil well that can be capped or even an underground lake that will spew forth for a while and then dry up. The transition zone contains a vast amount of water. An almost unfathomable amount — to use a nautical term.”

“I need numbers,” Rudi said. “Just how much water are we talking about?”

“Three or four times the amount in all the world’s oceans, rivers, lakes and ice caps combined. If it all came to the surface, the landmass of the Earth would be completely submerged. This would be a water-covered planet, a shimmering blue ball without a single island. Even the tip of Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth, would be submerged beneath twelve thousand feet of water.”

Rudi didn’t react to the statement offhand. He knew Henley was given to predictions of destruction — all part of his Hamlet-like nature. But the man was a first-rate scientist. He didn’t twist the numbers, he just tended to focus on the worst possible outcome.

Priya, on the other hand, was the eternal optimist. It was in her nature to believe things were never as bad as they looked and that nothing couldn’t be overcome. Rudi turned her way. “How likely is that to happen?”

“Highly unlikely,” Priya said with a glance toward Henley. “But if just five percent of the water trapped inside the transition layer is forced to the surface… sea levels will rise by two thousand feet.”

“Two thousand feet?” Rudi said.

Priya nodded.

“And how likely is a five percent discharge from this layer of rock?”

She shrugged. “Impossible to say. No one’s ever seen this before. We don’t know exactly what is happening. All we know is, it’s getting worse. The rise in the sea level has accelerated in the last six months, again in the last ninety days and once again in the last five weeks. As for predictions… the basic math is simple. A five percent discharge is far more likely than a ten percent surge. Four percent is more likely still. Three… two… one… take your pick. A one percent discharge is exponentially more probable than a five percent release. But even at that level — even if just one drop in a hundred is forced out of the transition layer — the sea level will still rise four hundred feet.”

Henley chimed in with more doom and gloom. “You’d lose every major coastal city in the world, half the landmass of South America, most of Northern Europe, large swaths of America especially, in the south and along both urban coasts. Not to mention the most densely populated swaths of Asia and India. Two billion people would be forced to relocate. But there will be nowhere to put them and nothing to feed them, even if they could find somewhere to call their own. And as if that’s not bad enough—”

Rudi cut him off. He didn’t need Henley launching into depressing detail about what would happen to humanity. He needed them to find a way to stop it. “Is there a way for us to put a halt to this upwelling?”

“We can’t be sure,” Priya said. “We’d have a much better idea of what’s possible if we knew exactly what the Chinese did down there, but there is a possibility that they’ve released something that can’t be put back in the bottle.”

Rudi studied her face. Determination was mixed with a sense of grim acknowledgment. Better than any of them, Priya knew there were forces that human effort and engineering just couldn’t overcome.

“Put all the data into a report,” Rudi said. “In fact, give me two reports. One with all the technical data and a simpler version that laypeople and politicians can understand. I’ll need them both within the hour.”

“Are you going to go public with it?” Priya asked.

“No,” Rudi said. “Something far more dangerous. I’m going to send the information to China.”