Polar Shift Page 9

  Austin pondered the implications of the professor’s statement. “There is a third possibility,” he said after a moment. “Man acting as God.”

  Arching a bushy eyebrow, Adler said, “That’s out of the question, of course.”

  Austin smiled. “Not necessarily. Mankind has a history of trying to control the elements.”

  “Controlling the sea is another matter.”

  “I agree, although there have been crude but effective attempts. Dikes and storm barriers go back hundreds of years.”

  “I was a consultant on the Venice tidal gate project, so I know what you mean. Stopping the ocean involves a relatively simple concept. It’s the engineering that becomes the challenge. The creation of giant waves would be far more difficult.”

  “But not impossible,” Austin said.

  “No, not impossible.”

  “Have you given any thought to means? Something like huge underwater explosions?”

  “Highly unlikely,” Adler said with a shake of his head. “You’d need an explosion of a nuclear level, and it would be detected. Any other ideas?”

  “Not offhand,” Austin said. “But it’s definitely something that NUMA should investigate.”

  “You have no idea how happy I am to hear you say that,” Adler said with relief. “I thought I was going crazy.”

  A thought occurred to Austin. “Joe wondered if the Trouts’ work might shed some light on this mystery,” he said.

  “Sure, I remember. You mentioned that a couple of your NUMA colleagues are working on another research project in this area.”

  Austin nodded. “South of our position. They’re with a group of scientists on the NOAA ship Benjamin Franklin, looking into the biological implications of the giant eddies in the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “As I said, I wouldn’t rule anything out. It’s certainly worth looking into.”

  “We can talk to them about their findings when we get back to port.”

  “Why wait?” Adler said.

  Adler’s fingers played over the keys and a Web site popped up on the screen, followed by a satellite image showing the mid-Atlantic coast. “The ocean satellite taking this picture can pick up an object as small as a sardine.”

  “Amazing,” Austin said, leaning close to the screen.

  Adler clicked the computer mouse. “Now we’re seeing ocean water temperature. That wavy band of reddish brown is the Gulf Stream. The blue area is cold water, and those circular blobs in tan are warm water eddies. I’ll zoom in on our ship.”

  He worked the computer mouse so that one of the tan-colored swirls filled the screen. The outlines of two vessels were now visible near the whorl.

  “That blip is the Throckmorton. The other one must be your NOAA ship. Wow! This stuff still amazes me.”

  Austin leaned over Adler’s shoulder. “What’s that smaller circle in the southeast quadrant?”

  Adler enlarged the image. “It’s a separate eddy. Acting real funny. The numbers in the little boxes show water movement speed and level. The level within the swirl seems to be dropping while the water is moving at increasing speed.” Adler’s eyes were glued to the screen. The swirl, now almost a perfect circle, continued to grow. “Migod,” he said.

  “What’s the problem?”

  The professor tapped the screen. “We seem to be looking at the birth of a gigantic whirlpool.”

  7

  GAMAY MORGAN-TROUT carefully lowered the Van Dorn sampler over the port rail of the NOAA survey ship and watched the nine-liter plastic cylinder sink beneath the foam-flecked waves. She played out the thin connecting cable as the sampler plunged hundreds of feet to the ocean bottom.

  After the bottle filled with water and automatically sealed, she began to winch it back on board with the help of her husband. Paul Trout hauled the dripping bottle the last few feet from the water, detached the sampler from the cable and held it to the light, as if he were testing the color of a fine glass of wine.

  Trout had a twinkle in his hazel eyes. “This is absurd,” he said.

  “What’s absurd?”

  “Consider what we’re doing.”

  Still puzzled, Gamay said, “Okay, we’ve just tossed a fancy bottle over the side and hauled it up filled with seawater.”

  “Thank you for making my point. Look around at this ship. The Benjamin Franklin is loaded with cutting-edge research gear. We’ve got stuff like specialized echo sounders, multibeam and side-scan sonar and the latest in computer hardware and software. But we’re no different from the ancient mariners who smeared wax on their sounding lead to check out the composition of the ocean bottom.”

  Gamay smiled. “And now we’re about to collect plankton using an old-fashioned fisherman’s net. I draw the line when it comes to transport. No rowboat. How’s the Zodiac coming?”

  “Ready to go,” Trout said. He read the surface of the sea with an experienced eye. “Wind’s freshening. Could get choppy. We’ll have to stay sharp.” He pronounced it “shaap,” betraying his New England roots.

  Gamay glanced at the whitecaps starting to dot the grayish blue water. “We might not be able to go out again for days if we wait.”

  “My thoughts exactly.” He handed her the Van Dorn sampler. “I’ll meet you at the Zodiac davit.”

  Gamay delivered the sampler to the wet lab. The water sample would be analyzed for trace metals and organisms. She went to her cabin, pulled a hooded, foul-weather suit on over her jeans, Icelandic wool sweater and chamois shirt, and tucked her long, dark red hair under a multicolored “Friends of the Hunley” baseball cap. Slipping into her personal flotation device, she went out to the stern deck.

  Trout was waiting next to the davits that held the twenty-three-foot-long, rigid inflatable boat. He was dressed impeccably as usual. Under a full suit of yellow commercial-grade, foul-weather gear, he wore designer jeans specially tailored to fit his six-foot-eight frame and a navy sweater made of cashmere wool. One of the colorful bow ties to which Trout was addicted adorned the button-down collar of his Brooks Brothers oxford-weave blue shirt. As a counterpoint to his casual elegance, he wore scuffed work boots, a holdover from his days at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where functional footwear was de rigueur. He wore a navy wool cap to protect his head.

  The Trouts climbed aboard the rigid inflatable boat and the Zodiac was lowered into the sea. Paul started the Volvo Penta diesel inboard/outboard engine as Gamay cast off the tether line. They stood side by side at the steering console with legs braced in a charioteer’s pose, knees bent to absorb the shock of the flat-bottomed hull slapping the waves.

  The rugged inflatable craft planed over the seas like a playful dolphin. Trout steered toward a Day-Glo orange sphere that was bobbing in the water about a quarter mile from the ship. They had set the buoy earlier in the day to provide a reference point for the phytoplankton survey.

  It was not the most hospitable work environment. Glowering clouds were moving in from the east, and the horizon line was barely visible where gray sea met gray water. The easterly wind had come up a few knots. The thick cloud layer blocking the sunlight was starting to spit light rain.

  But as they prepared for the survey, Paul and Gamay wore that particular expression of bliss people born to the sea have when they are in their natural element. Paul had climbed aboard a fishing boat with his fisherman father as soon as he could walk. He had fished commercially out of the Cape Cod village of Woods Hole until he went off to college.

  Gamay was unfazed by the gloomy weather, although her background was somewhat different from Trout’s. Born in Racine, Wisconsin, she had spent many of her younger years sailing the sometimes cantankerous waters of the Great Lakes with her father, a successful developer and yachtsman.

  “You must admit this is a lot more fun than wallpapering,” Paul said as he maneuvered the boat closer to the buoy.

  Gamay was readying the survey gear. “This is more fun than almost anything I can think of,” she said, ignoring the cold
spray that splashed her face.

  “Glad you qualified your statement with ‘almost,’” Paul said with a leer.

  Gamay gave him a sour look that didn’t match the amusement in her eyes. “Pay attention to what you’re doing or you’ll fall overboard.”

  The Trouts hadn’t expected to be back to sea so soon. After wrapping up their last mission with the Special Assignments Team, they had planned to catch some R & R. Trout had once observed that Gamay’s relaxation technique must have been learned from a French Foreign Legion drillmaster. A fitness and exercise nut, she was only home a few hours before embarking on an Olympic-level running, hiking and biking schedule.

  Even that wasn’t enough. Gamay had a habit of making a top priority of whatever happened to come into her mind at a given moment. Trout knew he was in trouble when, after a day together cruising through the Virginia countryside in their Humvee, she eyeballed the living-room wallpaper of the Georgetown town house they were constantly remodeling. He had nodded with learned patience as Gamay ticked off the remodeling projects she had piled on their plate.

  The remodeling frenzy lasted only a day. Gamay was slapping wallpaper on a wall with typical ferocity when Hank Aubrey, a colleague from Scripps Institute of Oceanography, called and asked if she and Paul would like to take part in an ocean eddy survey off the mid-Atlantic coast aboard the Benjamin Franklin.

  Aubrey didn’t have to twist their arms. Working with Austin and the Special Assignments Team was a dream job that took them on adventures to exotic parts of the world. But sometimes they yearned for the pure research of their college years.

  “Ocean eddies?” Trout had said after they accepted the invitation. “I’ve read about them in the oceanographic science journals. Big, slow-moving swirls of cold or warm water that are sometimes hundreds of miles across.”

  Gamay nodded. “According to Hank, there’s a lot of new interest in the phenomenon. The whorls can hamper offshore drilling operations and affect weather. On the good side, they can churn up marine microorganisms from the ocean floor to the surface and cause an explosion up the food chain. I’ll be studying the flow of nutrients and the impact on commercial fishing and whale populations. You can look into the geological components.”

  Noting the growing excitement in his wife’s voice, Paul said, “I love it when you talk dirty.”

  Gamay puffed away a strand of hair that had fallen over her face. “We scientist types are a bit odd when it comes to the things that turn us on.”

  “What about the wallpapering?” Paul teased.

  “We’ll hire someone to finish it.”

  Paul tossed the wallpaper brush into a bucket. “Finestkind, cap,” he said, using a phrase from his fishing days.

  The Trouts worked together with the precision of a fine Swiss watch. Their teamwork was a quality former NUMA director James Sandecker recognized when he hired them for the Special Assignments Team. Both were now in their mid-thirties. From outward appearances, they were an unlikely couple.

  Paul was the more serious of the two. He seemed constantly in deep thought, an impression that was heightened by his habit of speaking with his head lowered, eyes peering up as if over glasses. He seemed to reach deep inside himself before saying anything of importance. His seriousness was tempered by a sly sense of humor.

  Gamay was more open and vivacious than her husband. A tall, slender woman who moved with the grace of a fashion model, she had a flashing smile with a slight gap between her upper front teeth, and, while not gorgeous or overly sexy, was appealing to most men. They had met at Scripps, where he was studying for his doctorate in deep-ocean geology, and Gamay was switching her field of interest from nautical archaeology to marine biology.

  A few hours after receiving the call, they were packed and boarding the Benjamin Franklin. The Franklin had a highly trained crew of twenty, plus ten scientists from various universities and government agencies. Its primary mission was to conduct a hydrographic survey along the Atlantic Coast and the Gulf of Mexico.

  On a typical trip, the ship made thousands of precise depth measurements to create a picture of the ocean bottom and any wrecks or other obstructions that happened to be present. The information was used to update nautical maps for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

  Aubrey had greeted them at the top of the gangway and welcomed them aboard the ship. Aubrey was a slightly built man whose flighty energy, sharply pointed nose and nonstop chatter made him resemble an English sparrow. He led them to their cabin. After dropping off their bags, they headed to the mess hall. They settled at a table, and Aubrey brought them cups of tea.

  “Damn, it’s great to see you,” he said. “I’m really pleased you could join our project. How long has it been since we’ve seen each other, three years?”

  “More like five,” Gamay said.

  “Ouch. Much too long, in any case,” he said. “We’ll make up for it on this trip. The ship’s due to leave in a couple of hours. I often think of you working at NUMA. It must be fascinating,” Aubrey said in a voice tinged with envy. “My work on big swirling masses of water pales by comparison with your adventures.”

  “Not at all, Hank,” Gamay said. “Paul and I would kill for the opportunity to do pure science. And from what we’ve read, your research affects a great many people.”

  Aubrey brightened. “I suppose you’re right. There will be a formal scientific orientation session tomorrow. What do you know about the phenomenon of ocean eddies?”

  “Not a lot,” Gamay said. “Mostly, that the swirls are a largely unexplored scientific area.”

  “Absolutely right. That’s why this survey is a matter of great importance.” He plucked a napkin from its holder and produced a ballpoint pen from his pocket in a gesture the Trouts had seen on a dozen other occasions.

  “You’ll get to see the satellite images, but this will show you what we’re dealing with. We’re headed to a site close to the Gulf Stream, about two hundred miles out. This swirl is a hundred miles across, located east of New Jersey, on the edge of the Gulf Stream.” He drew an irregular circle on the napkin.

  “Looks like a fried egg,” Trout said.

  Trout liked to kid Aubrey about his penchant for working out scientific problems on restaurant napkins, even suggesting once that he compile them in a textbook.

  “Artistic license,” Aubrey said. “It gives you an idea of what we’re dealing with. Ocean eddies are basically giant, slow-moving whirlpools, sometimes hundreds of miles across. They seem to be cast off by ocean currents. Some rotate clockwise. Others move counterclockwise. They can transport ocean heat or cold, and move nutrients from the bottom of the ocean to the top, affecting weather and creating an explosion of marine life up the food chain, depending.”

  “I’ve read somewhere about fishing trawlers working the edges of these things,” Trout said.

  “Humans aren’t the only predators that have discovered the biological implications of eddies.” Aubrey sketched out a few more pictures on the napkin and held it up.

  “Now it looks like a fried egg being attacked by giant fish,” Trout said.

  “Actually, as anyone with eyes can see, these are whales. They’ve been known to feed along the edges of eddies. There are a couple of teams trying to track whales to their feeding grounds.”

  “Using whales to find whorls,” Trout observed.

  Aubrey grimaced at the wordplay. “There are better ways to find these puppies than tagging sperm whales. Thermal expansion causes the water inside an eddy to create a bump in the ocean that can be traced by satellite.”

  “What causes ocean currents to shed these eddies?” Trout said.

  “That’s one of the things we hope to learn on this expedition. You two are ideally suited for the project. Gamay can apply her biological expertise to the question, and we’re hoping you can come up with some of the computer models you’re so good at.”

  “Thanks for inviting us aboard. We’ll do our best,” Gama
y said.

  “I know you will. This goes beyond pure science. These big swirls can be real weathermakers. A stalled ocean eddy off the California coast can produce cold temperatures and rain in L.A. Similarly, in the Atlantic an eddy spinning off the Gulf Stream can produce thick fog.”

  “Not much we can do about the weather,” Trout said.

  “That’s true, but knowing what to expect will allow us to adapt to it. The ocean eddy survey could be vital to the nation’s economy. The safety of commercial shipping and the flow of petroleum, coal, steel, cars, grain and computerized cargo depend on accurate weather forecasting.”

  “Which is why NOAA is so interested in what we’re doing,” Trout said.

  Aubrey nodded. “That reminds me, I’ve got to talk to the captain about our schedule.” He rose from his seat and pumped their hands. “I can’t tell you how pleased I am to be working with you guys again. We’re having a get-to-know-each-other party tonight.” He slid the napkin across the table to Trout. “There will be a quiz on this material in the morning, wise guy.”

  Luckily for Trout, Aubrey was only joking about the quiz, although the orientation was comprehensive. And by the time the survey ship dropped anchor, both Trouts had become well versed in ocean eddy science. From the vantage point of the ship’s deck, the sea in the vicinity of the swirl looked no different from any other part of the ocean, but satellites and computer models had shown it to be moving at approximately three miles per hour.

  Trout had done some computer graphics of the ocean bottom in the vicinity of the swirl, and Gamay concentrated on the biological applications. The phytoplankton survey was a vital piece of her research, which was why she was so anxious to get it out of the way.

  With the Zodiac rocking in the troughs between waves, they lowered a Neuston net over the side. The net had a rectangular, tubular frame, and the ten-foot cloth net itself was long and tapering, which allowed it to sample large volumes of water. They let out the line so that the net floated partially out of the water. Then they made several tows straight out in a radius from the marker buoys, keeping an eye on the white-hulled NOAA ship to maintain their bearings. The results were good. The net was bringing in solid samples of plankton.