Glimmering

RUBRIC

I. In June 1996, an emergency meeting of the United Nations World Council I. on Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Global Warming was held in Rio Gallegos, Argentina, to discuss the unpredicted and potentially disastrous rise in global temperatures during the previous eighteen months. In a desperate effort to stabilize the atmospheric concentrations of carbon gases, the European Union, allying itself with Trinidad, Tobago, New Zealand, and Australia, led the push for ratifying the 1991 UN climate treaty and the earlier Montreal Protocol. This revised treaty, very narrowly passed despite the vocal and hostile opposition of the United States, China, and Russia, provided for immediate worldwide implementation of an involuntary cap on emissions, as well as an international ban on CFCs and HCFCs. In a concession to pressure from the conservative governments of the U.S., Japan, Russia, and China, the council also passed a bill that permitted limited industrial use of the experimental refrigerant and heating agent bromotetrachloride, or BRITE.

II. In the early 1990s, BRITE had been developed in Finland as a substitute II. for chlorofluorocarbons and hexachlorofluorocarbons, and had been used in experiments to mine gas hydrate in the Arctic. The polar regions’ vast deposits of gas hydrate, with their frozen stores of methane, held the potential to provide twice as much carbon energy as the fossil fuels that had helped cause the rapid degradation of the ozone layer. BRITE appeared to have no adverse environmental effects; unlike CFCs and HCFCs, it degraded in the upper levels of the atmosphere. It was also relatively inexpensive to produce.

By the end of 1996, BRITE was in common use throughout the industrialized world.

III. In March 1997, during an American gas hydrate–mining expedition off the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, a massive series of ocean floor avalanches occurred, releasing a sudden, almost inconceivably vast store of methane from the hydrate reservoir. The Antarctic deposits alone contained over three times the amount of methane found in the atmosphere; methane has a greenhouse effect eleven times that of carbon dioxide. Along with the loss of life and scientific equipment in Antarctica, three thousand canisters of BRITE were destroyed, their contents voided into the atmosphere like smoke.

The gas hydrate explosion had the misfortune to occur at the same time as a massive solar storm, predicted some three days earlier by NOAA’s newly launched Hermes X-ray satellite. Solar physicists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab cheered as the first images crept across their monitors: the sun’s corona disappearing as a billion tons of gas spewed forth. Three days later, this river of solar particles streamed into the Van Allen radiation belt like a celestial lava flow, even as the Ross Ice Shelf collapsed.

This disastrous confluence of events created a surging electrical current that altered the earth’s magnetic field. Transformers exploded; circuit breakers shut down; satellite transmissions were lost as an early night descended upon the world’s cities. Fifty kilometers above the earth, the sun’s ultraviolet rays began a complicated pavane with bromotetrachloride.

IV. On March 26, 1997, the glimmering began.