Fire Ice Read online

  A feminine voice purred through the speakers placed strategically around the room.

  “Hello, Dr. Reed. How nice to see you again...”

  AS THE DOORS hissed shut behind him, Roy Jenkins thought it strange that he was the only one getting off the elevator. He looked at the numerals on the wall and swore to himself. He'd become the absentminded professor he had always scorned. The receptionist had said the ninth floor. Preoccupied with his thoughts, he had pushed the button for the tenth.

  Instead of the standard office architecture of hallways, cubicles and offices, a vast glass-enclosed area took up the entire floor. Jenkins should have turned back to the elevator, but scientific curiosity got the best of him. He walked past banks of blinking computers, glancing from left to right, listening to the electronic whisperings. He could have landed on an alien planet peopled only by machines. With some relief he came upon the two men behind the large glowing console at the center of the computer complex. They were looking at a large screen that seemed to hang by invisible wires, and was dominated by the image of a woman in vivid color. She had topaz brown eyes, auburn hair and the bottom of the monitor barely hid her ample cleavage.

  The woman was talking, but even more odd, one of the men, who wore his long hair in a ponytail, was talking back to her. Thinking he had stumbled into a showing of a very private nature, Jenkins was about to back out, but the other man, who sported a hairdo like a wheat plant gone to seed, saw him and grinned.

  “At last, our pastrami sandwiches,” he said.

  “Pardon me?”

  Reed saw that Jenkins was carrying a briefcase instead of f a white paper bag, studied Jenkins's weathered and tanned face and then took in the workshirt and cap.

  “Guess you're not from the cafeteria,” he said sadly.

  “My name is Leroy Jenkins. I'm sorry to bother you. I got off at the wrong floor and sort of wandered in here.” He looked around. “What is this place?”

  “NUMA's computer center,” said the ponytailed man. He was boyish, clean-shaven face with a narrow nose and gray eyes. “Max can answer just about any question you throw her way.”

  “Max?”

  Yaeger gestured to the screen. “I'm Hiram Yaeger. This is Hank Reed. That lovely lady up there is a holographic illusion. Her voice is a feminine version of my own. I used my own face originally, but I got tired of looking at myself and dreamed up a pretty woman, my own wife.”

  Max smiled. “Thank you for the compliment, Hiram.”

  “You're welcome. Max is smart as well as beautiful. Ask her any question you'd like. Max, this is Mr. Jenkins.”

  The image smiled and said, “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Jenkins.”

  I've been in the wilds of Maine for too long, Jenkins thought. “Actually, it's Dr. Jenkins. I'm an oceanologist.” He drew a breath in. “I'm afraid my questions are rather complicated. They've got to do with methane hydrates.”

  Yaeger and Reed looked at each other, then at Jenkins.

  Max said, with a sigh that was more than human, “Is it really necessary to repeat myself?”

  “Nothing personal, Dr. Jenkins. Max has been working on the same subject for the last hour or so,” Yaeger said. He punched out the cafeteria number on the phone and turned to Jenkins. “We'd like you to join us for lunch.”

  Reed leaned forward. “I recommend the pastrami. It's an existential experience.”

  THE SANDWICH WAS as tasty as promised. Jenkins realized that with the exception of the bag of peanuts he'd had on the plane, his stomach was empty. He took a swig of root beer to wash his lunch down and looked at the other men, who were waiting expectantly.

  “This is going to sound crazy,” he said.

  “Crazy is our middle name,” Yaeger said. Reed nodded his head in agreement. Although the two men looked like an overaged hippie and a munchkin with a Don King hairdo, they appeared very bright. More important, they were interested in hearing his story.

  “Don't say I didn't warn you,” he said. “Okay,” he began. “I retired from teaching college a few years ago and bought a lobster boat in Rocky Point, my hometown.”

  “Aha! A fisherman,” Reed said. “I knew it.”

  Jenkins smiled, then resumed. “You probably read about the tsunami that hit there not too long ago.”

  “Yes, it was an awful tragedy,” Reed said.

  “It could have been worse.” Jenkins explained his role in warning the town.

  “Lucky you were there,” Yaeger said. “Something puzzles me, though. First time I've heard of something like that happening. New England isn't at the edge of a major fault like Japan or California.”

  “The only comparable precedent I found was the big wave caused by the Grand Banks earthquake in 1929. The quake's epicenter was under the ocean on the continental slope south of Newfoundland and east of Nova Scotia. The tremor was felt in Canada and New England, but the source was two hundred and fifty miles from the nearest land, so damage was negligible. Roads were blocked by landslides, chimneys broken and dishes rattled. Otherwise, the shock had little impact. The biggest effect was on the sea.”

  “In what way?” Reed said.

  “There were two ships near the epicenter. The vibrations were so violent they thought they'd lost a propeller or hit an uncharted wreck or sandbar. The quake created a great wave that struck the south coast of Newfoundland three hours later, running up into rivers and inlets in the little fishing villages along sixty miles of coastline. The worst damage was at a wedge-shaped bay on the Burin Peninsula. The tsunami rose to thirty feet at the apex of the bay, damaged docks and buildings and killed more than twenty-five people.”

  “Very similar to what happened at Rocky Point.”

  “Almost a mirror image. The fatality and injury rate was lower in my town, thank goodness. There was another important similarity. Both waves seem to have been caused by huge underwater slides. There was no doubt that an earthquake caused the Grand Banks disaster. The oceanic cables were broken in dozens of places.” He paused. “Here's where they were different: The Rocky Point slide seems to have been caused without a quake.”

  “Interesting. Were there any seismic readings?”

  “I checked with the Weston Observatory outside of Boston. The Grand Banks quake had a magnitude of 7.2. So we know something of that magnitude will cause a tsunami. The Rocky Point readings were more muddled.” He paused. “There was a shock, but it didn't fit the classic pattern for a quake.”

  “Let me see if I'm clear on this. Are you really saying the Rocky Point slump was not from an earthquake?”

  “I think that can be fairly well established. What I can't say is what actually caused the landslide.” Yaeger looked over the tops of his granny glasses. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

  “Something like that. I had read about the methane- hydrate deposits found off the continental slope and wondered if instability in those pockets of gas could have caused the slump.”

  “It's certainly possible,” Reed said. “There are huge pockets of the stuff off both coasts. We've found major deposits off of Oregon and New Jersey, for instance. You've heard of the Blake Ridge?”

  “Sure. It's an undersea promontory a couple of hundred miles southeast of the U.S.”

  “Off the North Carolina coast, to be exact. The ridge is loaded with methane hydrate. Some people think the ridge is a 'pressure cooker.' Surveys have found craters pockmarking the ocean floor where the stuff has melted and seeped out, releasing methane gas.”

  Jenkins scratched his head. “I'm sorry to say I don't know a lot about hydrates. I try to keep up through the professional journals since leaving the university, but what with the lobstering and so on, I never seem to have enough time.”

  “It's a comparatively new area. You're familiar with chemical composition of hydrate?”

  “It's made up of natural gas molecules trapped in ice.”

  "That's right. Someone dubbed it 'fire ice.' It was discovered in the nineteenth century, b
ut our knowledge has been pretty sketchy. The first natural deposits were under the permafrost in Siberia and North America -they called it marsh gas - then in the 1970s, a couple of scientists from Columbia University found pockets under the seafloor when they were doing seismological studies at the Blake Ridge. In the 1980s, the Woods Hole submersible Alvin found stone undersea chimneys formed by escaping methane. I was on the first big survey back in the mid-1990s. That's when we discovered the deposits in the Blake Ridge. They're only a fraction of what's out there. The potential is vast.”

  “Where are the major deposits?”

  “Mostly along the lower slopes of the world's continental shelves, where the seabed drops from four hundred feet or so into the abyss several miles deep. There are major pockets off both U.S. coasts. As I said, you can find them in Costa Rica, Japan, India, and under the arctic permafrost. The sheer size of the deposits is astounding. The most recent estimates are ten thousand gigatons. That's double the total amount of all known reserves of coal, oil and natural gas.”

  Jenkins let out a low whistle. “Waiting there to be tapped when we suck our petroleum reserves dry.”

  “I wish it were so easy,” Reed said with a sigh. “A few technical problems have to be ironed out before extraction is practical.”

  “Is it dangerous to drill?”

  “The first time a ship drilled into a pocket was in 1970. Nothing happened, but drillers were afraid for years afterward that they'd get blown out of the water. Eventually, a few experimental bores showed that research drilling was safe. Getting hydrates to the surface to heat your home or run your SUV is another question. The environment is extremely hostile in the deep water where hydrates are found, and the stuff simply fizzes when we bring it up. The deposits may be another few hundred feet below the seafloor."

  "That sounds like a tough neighborhood for rigs to operate in.”

  “Absolutely. A number of countries and companies are working on the problem, though. One method is pumping steam or water down the drill hole. This melts the hydrate and releases methane. Then you pump the methane to the surface of the seafloor through another drill hole. Next comes the question of what you do with it. When you remove the hydrate, the seafloor destabilizes.”

  “There goes your expensive pipeline.”

  “A good possibility. Which is why engineers have come up with a scheme to put a production facility on the seafloor. You pump the hydrate out and combine it with water. The mix goes into big tanks shaped like dirigibles. Submarines would tow them to the shallows, where the hydrates would be safely broken down into fuel and water."

  “With any of those methods, it sounds like mining hydrates is going to be like walking on eggshells.”

  “Even more difficult. Now back to your original question.”

  “About hydrates as a source of earthquakes and big waves.”

  “It's highly possible. There is evidence that the natural melting has destabilized seafloor slopes. They've found massive submarine landslides off the U.S. East Coast, Alaska and other countries. The Russians found unstable hydrate fields off Norway. They think one of the biggest releases ever recorded caused the Storrega submarine landslide: Eight thousand years ago, more than a thousand cubic miles of sediments slid for miles down the slope of the Norwegian continental slope.”

  “I' m acquainted with Storrega,” Jenkins said. “Then you'd know that the huge mud slide caused unimaginable tsunamis. The Grand Banks and Rocky Point would have been bathtub waves by comparison.”

  Jenkins nodded. “What about man-made landslides. Possible?”

  “I'd say they're plausible, sure. A drilling platform inadvertently cause a deposit to collapse, triggering a landslide.”

  Jenkins held his breath, then released it. “Inadvertently, yes. But could something like that be triggered deliberately?”

  The tone grabbed their attention. Reed said, “What are you saying, Dr. Jenkins?”

  Jenkins squirmed in his chair. “It's been driving me crazy. My gut instinct has been in conflict with my scientific training, which says gather all the evidence before coming to a conclusion, especially one as wild as this.”

  Reed scratched his chin. “Maybe, but as a scientist, I'm like you - I can't make that leap from conjecture to conclusion without a bridge of facts.”

  Yaeger got into the discussion. “Poetically said, Doc. Let's see if Max can help us. Were you eavesdropping, my love?”

  The auburn-haired image of a woman reappeared. “It's hard not to listen in when I have six supersensitive microphones. Where would you like me to take you?”

  Yaeger turned to the two scientists. “Gentlemen, it's all yours.”

  Reed had been giving it some thought. “Max, please give us an idea of the undersea methane-hydrate deposits along the U.S. coasts.”

  The face vanished and they were looking at a three-dimensional rendering of the sea bottom to the east and west of the United States, complete with mountains and canyons. Pulsating patches of crimson appeared in the shimmering blue sea off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

  “Now let's isolate this to the East Coast.” The shoreline between Maine and the Florida Keys appeared.

  “Good. Please zero in on Maine and show us the continental shelf.”

  They were looking at the long irregular coastline of the Pine Tree state stretching from Canada to New Hampshire. A wavy line appeared off the coast, running through the red patches of hydrates.

  “If I may,” Jenkins interjected, “could you highlight Rocky Point?”

  A cornflower blue bull's-eye indicated Jenkins's hometown. A close-up aerial view of the town showing its bay and river appeared in the lower right-hand comer of the screen.

  “Not bad,” Jenkins said, noting the extra touch.

  “Thank you," purred a disembodied voice.

  Jenkins gave Max his boat's position when he had first seen the nascent tsunami. A silhouette of a fishing boat appeared in the holographic sea.

  “Now we need a diagram showing the major undersea faults.”

  A spidery network of white lines appeared. The boat appeared to be in between Rocky Point and a major fault due east of the town.

  Yaeger said, “That was great, Max. While you're in profile mode, let's go back to the continental shelf at the epicenter of the shock.”

  Displayed on the screen was a cross-section of the ocean floor showing a wavy line representing the ocean's surface and a lower one that was the sea bottom. The continental shelf dropped off sharply. At the edge of the shelf was a thick fault that angled down. The fault intersected a variegated line that represented the methane-hydrate deposit under the limestone crust.

  “There's our trouble spot. Show us what happens when methane hydrates are released.” A methane plume rose from the ocean floor. The sea bottom along the slope of the continental shelf collapsed. A depression occurred in the water surface where the landslide occurred. The surface of the water cratered above the slide.

  The water tried to stabilize, creating a bump that moved along the ocean surface.

  “There's the genesis of the big wave,” Reed said.

  “Let me try something,” Yaeger said. “You heard what Dr. Jenkins said about the Richter scale reading at that location. Please give us a simulation of what happened.”

  Ripples that represented waves began to travel out from the area immediately around the slide. Max zoomed in on the wave heading for Rocky Point. When the moving arc was close to shore, the close-up of Rocky Point enlarged to fill the whole screen. The wave could be seen rolling into the harbor, onto the shore and up the river.

  Without being asked, Max split the screen showing the side view displaying the profile of the wave. The tsunami grew as it approached land, morphed into a giant watery claw, and crashed down on the sleepy harbor. There was silence in the room as Max repeated the scene again and again in fast and slow motion.

  Yaeger swiveled in his chair and said, “Comments, gentlemen?”

  “We'
ve established effect,” Jenkins said. “The big question is whether the cause was man-made.”

  “It's happened before,” Reed said. “Remember what I said about a drill platform's collapsing after accidentally releasing a plume.”

  “Max, I know you've worked hard, but I wonder if you could do me a favor.”

  “Of course, Dr. Jenkins.”

  “Thank you. Go back to your map of the East Coast and show us weak spots similar to those off Maine.”

  The map appeared again with pulsating bull's-eyes of varying sizes. The biggest were off the New England coast, New Jersey, Washington, Charleston and Miami.

  “Max, please simulate what would happen if the continental shelf collapsed at the major intersections with methane-hydrate deposits.”

  Within an instant, waves rippled out from the larger epicenters, reaching a height of thirty feet, hitting the coast and flowing into bays and up rivers and far onto land.

  Reed's eyes blinked rapidly behind the thick lenses. "Good-bye Boston, New York, Washington, Charleston and Miami.”

  “Meth is death,” Yaeger said softly. Seeing the puzzled faces of the older men, he explained, “It's an old hippie saying, meant to warn people of the dangers of using methamphetamines to get high.”

  Reed said, “This is worse than any drug, my friend.” Jenkins cleared his throat. “There was something I didn't mention.” He told them about the encounter with the huge ship the same day as the Rocky Point tsunami.

  “It sounds as if you think the ship had something to do with the landslide and the tsunami,” Yaeger said.

  Jenkins nodded.

  “Were there any markings on it?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. The ship was registered in Liberia, as a lot of them are, and the name on the hull was Ataman Explorer I. I checked the dictionary. It means the head man of a bunch of Cossacks.”

  “Ataman? Are you sure?”

  “Yes, does the name ring a bell?”

  “Possibly. How long are you in Washington, Dr. Jenkins?” Yaeger asked.

  “I don't know. As long as I have to be I guess. Why?”