04.04.2004/V1,I5
Here we gnaw on Universe and discuss the taste.
En le Rongeant - Terrible Trio - Climate, Comets, Energy - how it might unfold.
Part 3 of 4
We start with the wildly Fantastic (part 1),then to the merely improbable (part 2), then the completely likely (part 3, the worst). In part 4 the denouement, those elements we have in place this year.
Damn Magnets! Poles Flip!
Section 1
"Run!" Packer suited action to his words and ran as fast as he could past the slightly bewildered Mssr. Possile and his equally stationary Teutonic companion, Herr Schmidt. Both looked at Packer's USofA Government Issue Antarctica rated Parka flapping as he pushed himself toward Munson' Peak in the distance. "Runnnnnn!" drifted back on the frigid air from the huffing puffs of Packer's breath.
WHUMMMMMP!
Both the French soils scientist, Emile Possile, and his German astrophysicist friend turned to just where Packer had been standing outside the multi-function social interaction building. Being scientists first, they both leaned forward over the trash can-sized hole in the ice, peering down at the still steaming small nugget of a rock rapidly melting the ice under the exposed summer-roadway.
"Ohh, an aodel....."Schmidt started to say...
WHUMMP. WHUMMP. WHUMMMMMP!
Possile and Schmidt looked in dawning horror as all around them small, baseball sized flaming rocks impacted the ground. Schmidt, ever the astrophysicist, turned and looked up. Within a second he was running. Possile also followed both his gaze, and his action. They ran as fast as their nylon encased legs could carry them as they tried to outrun hundreds, if not thousands of small meteorites descending over Antarctica in a very steep angle.
Already their base camp was a shambles. Packer had made it to the slight protection afforded by the overhang of an exposed cliff on Munson's Peak. Possile could see him yelling and waving but heard nothing over the impact of hundreds of rocks. WHUMMP! Then the incredible sounds of ice turning to steam instantly. Possile was not that far behind Schmidt, and was amazed at the portly German's ability to accelerate his bulk so rapidly, when he was suddenly part of a WHUMP and found himself catapulted ass-over-teakettle and sailing over Schmidt feet first. He was tempted to wave as he passed Schmidt, but that impulse only lasted until he hit the ice and his right ankle shattered. Just as he was passing out, he had two thoughts that got all sort of intermingled, first was Packer pulling him by his shoulders, and second, that 'my didn't the ice really help when one's ass was on fire'.
Packer and Schmidt gazed out in disbelief at the destruction raining down on the continent and beyond. They could see thousands per hour of small fiery rocks dousing themselves into the now steaming sea, or burrowing into the ice with huge crashes and whumps. Base camp was essentially gone. As was most of the airfield and the three airplanes in what was left of the hanger. Out at sea, the two ships were leaning together as one had been holed and was listing into the other. Occasionally a human figure could be seen scurrying around. Whenever they saw anyone moving, Packer and Schmidt yelled and waved. Outside of the occasional chunk of the cliff-face being chipped off to tumble down in front of them, they were not exposed to the fiery missiles from space dominating that very early morning in May.
"Nicht gut." said Schmidt, pointing to the damaged base and the 'storm' of fireballs they could see skimming across the top of the sky, headed north.
***
Sindera and her three daughters were sleeping on the roof of their small, mud brick house just north of Sonari, India. A smallish village at the junction of two smallish rivers in a smallish provence in northern India, Sonari was hot. "Too hot for May." thought Sindera, "too hot". She lay there, listening to the slight sounds of her daughters fitful sleep in the hot air on the roof. At least it was cooler there than inside the house. Even with the windows open all day, and the shade of the many vines she had planted over the years, and the large neem tree, it was still reaching over 120 degrees inside during the day. And to try to cook?! With the floor even hotter than the walls! "Way too hot for this early." Sindera lay there, swaying gently in the hammock, the heat from the roof radiating into her back like a massage, watching the night sky, listening to her daughters sleep amid the background of the rivers just a mile or so away, and occasionally seeing the flash of meteors as they streaked across the sky heading north. "That is odd too. I had not heard of a yantra for these meteors?" Sindera thought. "And leave it to the greedy priests to come up with a tailsman against the evil inherent in any and all celestial bodies". Odd, as the priests were in the business of selling yantra, and were astronomers of some skill, so to have missed such a splendid opportunity.....well, it was odd.
The meteors whizzed silently and swiftly to the north, arcing such that Sindera wondered if they were striking up north in the mountains somewhere. That is where we belong, she thought. Up where the cool breezes blow down from the ice covered Himalayas and a body can sleep at night, unlike here, where it is just too hot...too early. Doesn't bode well for later this summer. Sindera remembered her neighbors, mostly the old ones, who had died in the summer before as the heat seeped up from the ground and even the roof had become too hot to endure. Most tried to make do laying in the shallows of the rivers, but the old ones were too far away, or too afraid of walking the path at night and so stayed at the houses....and died in the heat. Too hot. Sindera thought, drifting off to the sound of the water in the rivers. "Not good, this early in the spring."
***
"Nicht sehr gut". Replied Roger to Slyvia, his Suisse host's daughter. "Nicht sehr gut", he said again for emphasis as he pointed down over the rock escarpment and at the sloshing waters below.
Roger had hiked up the steep hill in the early morning twilight with Horst and his oldest daughter, Slyvia. At something over 60 years, Daniel had led them up the hill like he was going for a stroll around the local mall. Slyvia, a bit younger than 40 seemed to have no trouble keeping up. Roger, thought-himself-in-shape gym animal, found that stair-climbers are not really the same as climbing. It had taken only 3 hours, following Horst, to reach the top of the peak nearest his host's house. Roger had come up for a bit of late season skiing, only to find that the French booking agent had been woefully mis-informed. Not only was the snow gone, but the whole valley looked like something of a wildflower farm. It did seem somewhat early for there to be this much in the way of blooms that high up in the Suisse Alps, but who knew?
Well, apparently, as he was informed in halting english by his host over dinner, it was extra-ordinarily early for these levels of blooms. Easily over a month. The flowers had started their run in late March and just kept going like April was June. The conversation led first to flowers, then to months, then to seasons, and when Horst, discovering his guest to be a scientist, albeit an oceanographer, turned the conversation to water, and liquor. First he had Slyvia bring down a giant-dust mouse vaguely in the shape of a bottle which actually did have glass somewhere down under the dusty cover, and within the glass, some of the smoothest 36 year old 'kirili' (wildflower and honey steeped liquor made mostly from the woody vines and fruit of alpine berries) Roger would ever taste. As he took a sip, he agreed that this was smooth, that is after the first ten or twelve layers of throat lining were stripped off by the first shot.
"Der wasser?" Roger asked, turning Horst back to his subject.
"Ah, so. Der see." And then he was off, launched in a long story about the last 10 years or so of weather in their part of the Alps, leading up to the spectacular crash of some 20% of the Matterhorn in '02. Horst apparently saw this and was at great pains to repeatedly act out the destruction. After several kirili, Roger and Horst agreed that they did indeed see eye-to-eye on this whole 'sea issue'. Roger was sure he agreed, just not quite sure what he agreed with or to...not that it seemed to matter to Horst who looked quite relieved as he assisted Roger up to his room.
The exceptionally early banging on his door had been something of a shock to Roger. As was the very very cheerful Horst, and the very amused and smug looking Slyvia. As awareness of what was happening sunk it, Roger started to become agitated, but, the headache lurking in the bottom of each and every one of the kirili shots he had drunk, barely 8 hours ago, shut him and sat him down.
Just as the remainder of the headache laden kirili started to attack his stomach, Roger found a fruit-cakey sort of bread thing shoved in his mouth by Horst, just as Slyvia filled both his hands with a giant mug of coffee. No delicate swiss carafe coffee here. This was coffee that reeked of being boiled in a boot for a week. Real coffee, coffee that could be smelled 800 kilometers away in Rome and declared a sin. Serious coffee. It took one sip to get him moving, and the entire mug to get him out the door and starting up the 'hill'.
During the whole of the climb, Roger was silent, except for the occasional bit of retching. It was while recovering from one such bout, that he happened to look back over the valley and saw the comet, C/Q4 just over the southern horizon. It was a beautiful view, though he did have his concerns. Some of his fellows at the Institute were convinced recent global temperature increases were due to cometary influences on the sun. It made sense, Roger thought, just at the face of it. How can 350 plus comets plowing into the sun in just 18 months NOT have an affect? Of course the sun seemed brighter....it was brighter...goosed up by over 350 comets.
Several hard hours climbing later, Roger was leaning over a hard chunk of granite, looking down at Horst's 'Sea' problem.
Sure enough, it was a sea, or at least a really big, alpine lake. That according to Horst, wasn't there a few years ago. Only that little bit at the top of the pass into the valley yet remained, but Horst and Slyvia both assured him that the 'sea' was, only 3 years ago, a glacier.
"That's a problem, all right, Horst." Roger said. He leaned forward and stared all along the edge of the lake back up into the tops of the local clumps of Alps. "And that is a lot of water up this high, with a pretty flimsy looking dam if you ask me." Roger wanted to know what the Suisse government had to say about it. Listening to Horst and Slyvia rant and rave, he gathered that the Suisse government was less than forth coming on the 'sea' problem up here in the Alps. When, as they paused in mid-tirade for a refresher of much needed boot-coffee, Roger asked about the EU government, he could tell by the raised eyebrows that Feds everywhere seemed to be held in about the same level of respect, which was to say, none.
"Tides." Roger said, pointing down to the lake, to forestall another launching from either Horst or Slyvia. "Tides. You know, moon....la luna", he said, jabbing one finger up toward the moon high in the sky over the south west. "Nicht sehr gut. Very bad. And that ain't going to help any either." He moved his finger over to point to the brightening comet rising high in the early morning sky. He went on to explain by drawing coffee pictures in the light reddish dust on the rock, illustrating water very high up and how it could and would have tidal effects. And if the water was spread out, with rocky channels such as those in the steep alpine mountain tops, a rip-tide effect could occur. "It looks like it." Roger said, jabbing down toward the dam of glacial ice at the mouth of the valley. The waves were 'running' the side walls as they challenged the top of the ice. It did look to Roger as though some of the water may indeed be going over the top. "Nicht sehr gut." He had heard of this, but not paid too much attention, after all his specialty was ocean water, not lakes from retreating glaciers.
As he rose from the rock, to start heading back down, Roger noticed something else not so good. The granite was warm. The air temperature was still coolish, as they were still in the shade and not yet touched by the rising sun. But the rock, also in the shade, was warm. When he pointed this out to Horst, he sadly nodded his head. "Ya, ist alles varm. Matterhorn".
Roger understood. The Matterhorn crumbling over the last year, with threats of more, and larger chunks falling this summer, was indicative of what was happening to Switzerland as a whole. Unlike the Andes, or the Himalayan mountains, or the Rockies, the Alps of Europe were not solid rock. Rather they were huge mounds of perpetually frozen gravel and rock and earth shaped like mountains. Once the warming came, well, the gravel and rocks thawed, and started crumbling.
"One big, really big, pile of loose gravel covering central europe" thought Roger, on the way down. He was uneasy both because of the treacherous nature of the path, and now, because of the scarily thin glacial wall holding back all that water. "Nicht sehr damn gut".
***
"Get your no-good, lazy asses back to work." John Moreman, the third deck chief mate hissed out toward the two crewmen leaning over the edge of the forward deck railing just under the first of the awnings. John hissed again, afraid of alerting the captain's steward who liked to spend his waiting hours on the port side, second floor balcony where he could smoke without bothering the guests. John motioned furiously toward the pair of white clad workers absorbed in staring over and down at the sea.
When he couldn't catch their attention, John took his hat off, and carefully crept out to where his pair of cabin stewards were pointing toward something off the side.
"Ok," he hissed in their ears as he clamped his powerful arms one on each of his errant crew, "you two are coming with me!".
"But John, look, dude, off the side there." Jorge responded. He was Philippine and working his fifth Alaskan cruise for the company, and was normally reliable. Now, Hector on the other hand, he was a problem. "Look John. At that STUFF!".
"There it is again!" Hector shouted. Until Johns' tightening grip clamped down on the tender bits of his shoulder.
"Quiet." John hissed. And he looked. And as he looked, as his attention was drawn to the 'stuff' whatever it was, his grip loosened, until, almost of their own will, his hands came down on the railing. "What is it?", he asked.
"I figure it is frozen whale shit."
Hector replied.
"What?" John asked, taking his eyes off the odd stuff rising off the port side of the cruise ship.
"Well, just smell it dude. If that ain't frozen whale shit..."
John did smell it. He would have said it smelled more like pig farts, but the point was well taken. The rising mass of stuff, hard to distinguish in the dark night, with only the moon and the faint glow to the south of the comets to use as light, did stink. Horrifically. It was momentarily overwhelming, then due to the vessel's motion, thankfully gone, passing aft.
"Man, that stuff sure waters' your eyes." Jorge was saying as they watched the stuff disappear in the dark. "Never did see anything like that before. You?".
John had to acknowledge it was new to him as well. Just then, Hector pointed out another one rising from the waves. This one was close. It was large, a seeming blue honeycomb of some sort, about the size of several lifeboats in size, though it was hard to tell as it was surrounded by a giant bubble it seemed....that was when John got it. Methane. That was the smell. And sulfur. And something else. But he did not stop long enough to try to identify it. Running and shouting as he tore up the ways toward the bridge, he kept yelling, "Methane".
John's warning would not have done much good in any event, but as it was, the bubble of methane that he had seen surround the bluish mass of iced methane was merely a small one, within seconds of it bursting, the cruise ship moved into a large bubble of several million cubic feet of dense methane from frozen hydrate sitting on the ocean's surface and John suffocated between one floor and the next. Every crew member or passenger outside at the time was dead within minutes. It took those inside the boat a little longer to perish as the air-flow system mechanistically, and efficiently pumped methane into every corner of the ship which sailed on, guided on auto-pilot software and digital gps inputs. It's program, accepting the conflicting inputs, chose the most primary source, the compass, as instructed in its error handling routine, and as called for during this part of the cruise, headed north....toward Hawaii.
***
"You want me to say what?" Ricardo Brooks smoothed the errant hair he allowed to sneak out from his carefully crafted coiffure, and asked of the air in the news studio. His answer came back in the insert piece in his ear. His producer Sharon's voice repeated the line, so Ric, as he was known to the fans of the mid-morning news hour on DFX cable TV, repeated what he heard.
"IN 5.4.3...." the floor director waved a single finger at Ricardo.
"And next, a terrorist attack? Or space aliens? Or a new Bermuda Triangle? Cruise ship goes missing on Alaskan Tour today! More Mid East violence! In weather, our own Joyce Spears will have all there is about that crazy meteor storm over Asia this morning. And what about those refridgerator magnets, eh?...but here at DFX Cable News we have the story. AND coming right up after the break, we'll discuss all these interesting events with DOCTOR DAVID PRICE!. That's right. Dr. David Price, the White House science advisor. That man on the go, the man that knows, Dr. Price. Right here at DFX Cable News...."
***
Vallery Redcloud wondered about the refrigerator magnets too. She watched Ricardo fade into a Porsche whizzing down an empty road as she twisted the small corded twine around yet another bead in the long trailing tail of the dream-catcher she was making, and turned down the sound from 'defects tv', where 'der faderland presents the fair und balanced news'. Her house creaked a bit, the metal roof reacting to the heat escaping from the dry Georgia clay under her small cottage near Holland. "At least we're up a bit here toward the top of Taylor's Ridge where we do manage to shed some of the day's heat", she said to the two too fat cats cooling their bellies on the workroom floor. A small breeze came from the swamp cooler hanging in the window on the opposite wall. It made little mechanical complaining noises as it fanned breezes toward Vallery and the hot cats.
She had her computer going in the other room with the Princeton Eggs running all the time. Vallery wanted to always have the odd, discordant pinging program available and in the background. She had her brother plug the computer's sound system into her audio system so she could always here it, even out in the workshop where she made her nearly-adequate-living. Vallery found comfort in the eggs somehow. "You're just listening for the end of the world" her brother had chastised her as he hooked up the computer. "And what good will it do to know a few minutes early that you're toast?"...
"At least I will have those few minutes" Vallery replied, twisting in another bead. She made dream-catchers, and other 'stringey what-nots' as she said in her online auction advert, out of real American products, mostly bits of wood and string. The little dream catchers had caught-on and she made a subsistence living as an on-line auction poster. In 2004, she was one of the millions of newly-marginalized, working-but-not-employed, formerly-high-tech, poor. At least she was able to bring in some form of income now that the unemployment insurance had run its course and the stingy rich bastard senators refused to extend the benefits. She had actually heard Senator Fartsalot say right there on Defects TV that the senate "didn't want to encourage' non-work......!@!@! She almost had had apoplexy right there on the spot. Poor Reverend Blythe would have come by that afternoon to discover her body. But instead of choking on the crackers at the sound of Fartsalot pontificating on the 'American work ethic', him with his jowls-of-lazy-consumption flapping around like facial cellulite, she spit them out in her shock, treating her cats to a rain of half chewed cracker bits that sent them scurrying for the back room.
Vallery had first started to wonder about the magnets as she went to get some cooled water from the refrigerator as a result of the choking incident. She had not noticed when it started, but from that day on she had become aware that every day the magnets would slide further and further down her nearly empty refrigerator. Over the first couple of weeks, she would replace them in the morning. The next morning, they had all slid down the side of the white metal. At first, it had taken several days for the magnets to slide all the way down. Then, just one day. Recently, and it seemed more so since they started talking about the magnets on the news in the last couple of days, it had taken only half a day or so for the magnets to make the trip to the bottom of the box.
"Doctor Price probably knows"...Vallery mused as she listened to the EGGS pinging and clanging over the sound system and tied yet another bead in to the mass of twine and metal and feathers. A series of seemingly linked-into, maybe-going-to-turn-into, a pattern of clangs emerged from the EGGS and she waited for it to dissolve back into the randomness. Just then her house popped and creaked again. Just like my old bones she thought, trying to hear the pings and clangs over the house settling down in the last of yesterday's heat like an old dog.
"Too hot". Vallery said, more to the TeeVee than the occupied cats. Pretty soon, she thought, a day would come when the heat started to hold over from day to day. Not good. Would the old swamp cooler be able to cope? It had better. Vallery did not have money for air conditioning these days. She might join the other used-to-be-employed, and spend more time at the library where they kept it a very pleasant 65 degrees all day long....but how to get the cats in?...she mused, twisting yet another bead into the mix working in the very early morning as the heat from yesterday started to blend into the heat rising with today' sun.
***
"Not good, dude! Not good." Gopi Ramatharantha Sutter said, leaning over his room-mate's shoulder and staring at the screen. He and Lance Witherspoon were watching the real-time display from the Russian's main magnetometer center. On one computer screen Lance had the Antarctic magnetometer displayed. It was going crazy.
"Likely the meteor storm they babbled on about on DefectsTV" Lance had said, pointing at the Antarctic display, when Gopi had returned to their room from his late night lecture and started to freak out over the chaotic displays on virtually all of the computer screens his room-mate kept running 24x7. "How' was da prof?" he asked.
Gopi shrugged, "ok, usual crap. Talking like the economy and the dollar will still exist by the time we escape the prison of 'higher' education'. He turned his attention back to the main ban of 9 screens. Lance had pilfered or acquired dozens of computers, old, worn out mostly, all free and all from departing students, who either graduated, or ran out of money or the will to take on more debt. 'Good enough for this shit'. Lance said as he placed each computer into its small niche in the exceptionally crowed dorn room. 'Just monitoring the world.' This was Lance's 'education'. He refused to attend class, and spent all his time on-line with his dozens of machines.
Lance had had the good fortune to be officially, and errantly, classified as 'handi-capped' on his first year at Kansas Tech. It allowed him to do practically as he pleased as long as his bill was paid, and at least someone somewhere on the campus put something into the system each semester saying he was 'involved' in something.
He was involved with monitoring the end of the world. He had gotten hooked on message boards and other near-real-time communications as a high school student. Now he spent all his waking hours watching for the end of the world.
Lance's insistence to Gopi, his third roommate in as many years, that he was really on to something was provable, he said, just on the face of it. "Twenty five thousand people died in Europe in '03 of the HEAT! THE HEAT!" he said. "And this is the industrial world. We don't know how many died in Asia. Plus, this summer is gonna be seriously damn hot!".
"I know. I know. And the Pentagon thinks that 100 thousand Americans are going to keel over this summer due to heat problems." Gopi had said, once he had the refrain down pat. Problem was, Gopi started to think that maybe, just maybe, Lance was on to something.
More and more 'oddities' started showing up in Gopi's life. It started with the damn magnets on their mini-fridge always falling off at night and then went on to other 'strange-ness-es'. Like the nearly daily meteors. And the heat. So hot the roads were melting and it was barely into May yet. Then the comets.....not a good sign. Then the cruise ship going 'missing' last night. And the continuous hum in his brain that was the world-wide crop failures over the last couple of years. As an agriculture student, that was his area. And the news was not good. Strange news, like that not a single Japanese Maple root stock seed had germinated in Oregon last year. So Japanese maples were not to be had in the Pacific Northwest. And that was the hotbed of the decorative maple world.....and speaking of hotbeds, he had come from the lecture on the economics of global agriculture with a bit of news for Lance.
Though bored with the lecture, Gopi had been given a small thought window that led him down a trail, which led to a bit of thinking-path and up a logic-hill, until it occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, Lance had more to worry about with the heat than they both had thought. Gopi looked at the pile of pizza boxes neatly stacked in the only available 2 square foot area in the room.
"No more". Gopi said.
"Huh?" Lance queried.
"No more pizza." Gopi replied.
"What'dya mean?" Lance asked?
"Well, it's the nitrogen cycle. It seems it is heat vulnerable." Gopi said. He then sat and went on to explain that the ability of plants, all plants to take up nitrogen, an essential ingredient in plant material production, and essential to the production of food, such as wheat which became flour which became pizza crust, was entirely dependent on soil temperature.
"At 96 degrees Fahrenheit the nitrogen uptake begins to be affected. At 121 degrees it is reduced for most plants to less than 50 per cent efficiency." Gopi said.
"Well," said Lance, " what about 130 degrees? That is what the feds' figure we'll hit in the mid-west this year."
"At 130 air temp, if the ground can shed the heat each day, probably not too big a worry. But for most plants, somewhere between 134 and 141 degrees, the N2 cycle shuts down completely." said Gopi.
"No more pizza?" asked Lance.
"Nope. Not good at all". replied Gopi.
Just then, over the sound of the television in the background, and the whirring of computer drives, there was a noise like little cat claws scratching down a little tin box. Gopi and Lance looked around, then noticed the magnets on the refrigerator. were all sliding to the bottom in a slow motion ballet that seemed to defy gravity and attract their eyes. Within a second, all the computers in the room started going crazy, all sounding like they were machining lathes at a steel factory.
Lance tore furiously around the room, yanking power cords from sockets as fast as he could reach them. The noise rose to a huge crescendo, Lance got the last of the cords, and silence descended in the early morning as the first light in the un-noticed sky outside their dorm room chased off the last of the small swarm of meteors heading north.
"Nope. Not good." said Gopi, looking around in the deafening silence.
(end section 1)
***
Brightening sun is warming earth
Japan to harvest methane deposits
US Navy report of methane explorations.