Flood

34

Thandie began with the basics, a summary of the data on the global sea-level rise. By now the rise was being logged in detail, as alarmed oceanographers had planted a dense network of tide gauges across the planet, and specialized satellites probed the ocean with laser and radar altimeters.

And Lily watched, fascinated, as Thandie demonstrated the raising of ocean surfaces across the planet. A ghostly pink meniscus lifted up, indeed it accelerated with time, the vertical scale exaggerated, pulsing and rippling, evidently a signal of multiple sources feeding into the global rise. The graphic image was backed up by labels, data and equations annotating detail, and text was downloaded into screens set before the delegates.

Thandie talked about the changing nature of the ocean. As well as a global rise the scientists were witnessing a drop in salinity, an increase in ocean heat, and a change in distribution of that heat. The warmth of the ocean drove the climate, and thus the climate was also being reshaped, said Thandie. She ran through new climate models by NASA’s Goddard Institute, the Hadley Center in England, NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, and other groups in Russia, Japan, Germany, elsewhere. She showed how specific incidents could be tied to the anomalous warming, such as last year’s early monsoon across Asia.

Gary whispered to Lily, “Yeah. It’s the heat of the ocean surface that is spawning that big storm outside right now. Ocean heat is the fuel for hurricanes.”

Thandie outlined the effects on the biosphere. There had been blooms and diebacks in the living things in the oceans. Coral reefs, for instance, were being hit hard by the temperature shifts and increasing depths of coastal waters.

All of this was uncontroversial enough. It was when Thandie moved on to the fundamental causes of the flood, and her projections for its future, that the IPCC delegates started muttering.

The oceans were rising. There was a complication that as the oceans heated up the water expanded, which itself contributed to the rise. But the blunt truth was that to fill up the oceans, just like a brimming bathtub, you needed a running tap.

It didn’t take Thandie long to dismiss the consensus theory that the source of the floodwater could be melting ice caps. The caps, north and south, were monitored as closely as any other aspect of the planet’s climate system, and yes, they were melting-in fact the global ocean rise was accelerating the melting in Antarctica and Greenland, as it lifted sheets of ice away from the rock that anchored it. But there was no way the measured mass loss from the ice caps could be fueling the global expansion of the oceans; the numbers simply didn’t add up.

So Thandie spoke of other sources-of water stored within the Earth, and now being released. She produced images taken from the Trieste and other probes of vast, turbulent, underwater fountains, places where it seemed clear that hot, mineral-laden water was forcing its way out of the rock substrate.

And she produced her most striking figure. It was a map of the subterranean seas she believed she and others had been able to detect, from the evidence of seismic waves and direct submersible exploration. They were long reservoirs beneath all the major mid-ocean ridges, under the Atlantic, around Africa, spanning the Antarctic Ocean and surrounding the vast Pacific plate. The Atlantic reservoir was the best mapped, directly from Trieste; the rest she had had to construct from coarser seismic data.

Thandie had boldly given these sunken seas names, like Ziosudra and Utnapishtin and Deucalion, the last for the great Atlantic reservoir. Thandie said the names were variants of Noah, for a legend of a global flood had arisen in many cultures. Ziosudra was Sumerian, and Utnapishtin featured in the Gilgamesh saga. Deucalion came from Greek mythology. When Zeus punished the men of Hellas with heavy rain, he instructed Deucalion to build a chest within which he floated for nine days, finally landing on Mount Parnassus…

The delegates were increasingly restless, Lily saw, shifting in their seats and glancing at each other.

“Big mistake,” murmured Nathan. “You don’t bring in Noah with these guys.”

Thandie moved on to the question of why it should be just now that the subterranean reservoirs broke open. But here she was on shaky ground. She could only point to dramatic and abrupt changes in Earth’s climatic state in the past. Earth didn’t move smoothly through climatic changes; it seemed to have only a fixed number of stable states, between which it lurched, rapidly. For the last two million years the climate seemed to have been flickering between ice ages, glaciation, and warmer interglacials. The transitions could be rapid, taking only decades, even mere years. Maybe this was just another of those dramatic but natural transitions.

Or maybe it was humanity’s fault, Thandie said cautiously. She produced familiar statistics that showed how, since the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, humanity had become a planet-shaping species now overwhelming natural processes, making significant changes to cycles of oxygen and sulfur and nitrogen and moving ten times as much rock and dirt each year as the wind and the rain. Maybe the level of human intervention in the Earth’s cycles had reached what the climate modelers called DAI, for Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference. Humans were kicking the complex, interwoven, nonlinear processes of Earth so hard that the whole system was flipping over to a new stable state…

It seemed to Lily that Thandie had already lost her audience. The IPCC delegates looked away, chatted to each other, and one was even talking into a phone.

Thandie produced her conclusions, in a stark set of bullet points. She recommended funding for a widening study of the sea-level rise and its sources. For instance she wanted the use of US Army Deep Digger bombs, meant for busting bunkers, which could burrow deep and fast into solid rock, to confirm what was down there under the ocean floors. She wanted the big spaceborne planet-finder telescopes to focus on the physics of other watery worlds: did those planets have a dry-wet cycle? She wanted more modeling of the impact on the changing ocean heat distribution on global climate systems. She wanted modeling of the changing isostatic loads: would there be any more Istanbuls?

And, most of all, she wanted the delegates to have their governments prepare for, not a cessation of the sea-level rise, but an acceleration. There was no foreseeable limit to the volume of water her subterranean seas could yet release. The trends were still uncertain, but a long-term exponential rise was emerging: exponential meaning the rise would double, and double again and again, beyond any limit Thandie could see.

That was it. She didn’t get a round of applause. There were a couple of questions, neutral points about details of the science. Then the meeting broke up; people simply stood and walked out. Thandie, isolated, closed down her display. Lily saw Piers enter at the back of the room. He snagged delegates by the coffee machines; he seemed to be trying to talk to them.

Nathan Lammockson sat back in his chair and puffed out his cheeks. “Well. She blew it.”

Gary was looking worriedly at the data on his laptop screen.“They’re not so sure about the track of the storm as they were. The city’s Office of Emergency Management has woken up. Telling people not to try to evacuate the island, the freeways and expressways are jammed, where they’re not already flooded or otherwise blocked. They should go home and prepare a safe room.”

“Nice advice if you’re living in a tent in Central Park.”

“I think I’d better go take another look outside.” He stood and hurried away.

Lammockson paid no attention to him. “She should never ever in a million years have mentioned Noah. What a balls-up.”

“Come on,” Lily said, standing. “You can buy me a LaRei-class coffee, and we’ll go speak to Piers.”