Sam took another drink of his beer, and stared at the video recording. It showed some of the organizers setting up the diving barge. “Can you increase the speed?”
Ridley nodded. Pointing at the video controls, he said to Sam, “Help yourself.”
Sam sped up the feed, stopping it intermittently to examine any new divers as they entered the water. Ten minutes later, he reached the end of the recording.
Tom shook his head, “I don’t know, Sam. Your man either got here earlier, or he entered the water from behind us?”
Sam turned to face the clear blue water behind them. No one was on the surface, but that didn’t mean that his attacker couldn’t have entered unseen from that end of the flotilla. It would make more sense to do so, given he’d intended to murder someone.
Ridley looked up. “I’ve got to go meet someone. Feel free to stay here and keep an eye out for your friend if you want. There’s plenty of beer downstairs if you want it.”
Sam said, “Thanks, I appreciate it.”
Tom scanned the area for any divers getting out of the water. “Now what?”
Sam sighed. “Now we wait.”
Chapter Twenty
The warm midday sun glistened overhead, sending rays of light deep into the water.
Tom glanced at the still water and took another drink of his beer. “Tell me about the changes that have already happened.”
“What?” Sam asked.
“You said in the last three months the world has already undergone massive global changes due to this sudden shift in the magnetic poles, and the subsequent slowing of the ocean’s thermohaline circulations. What were they?”
Sam sighed heavily. “I’ll start as far south as Antarctica and work my way back a little closer to home, with what we’ve found so far. Like I said before, all of it could conceivably have occurred in any given year, but together it paints the picture of an impending doom. Some of these changes are small, but anyone with half a brain can see that it’s going to affect the entire world.”
Tom nodded. “Okay.”
“In Antarctica we have two main areas of concern currently, indicating rising global sea temperatures.” Sam removed a digital tablet from his backpack and opened up an image file, handing it to Tom. “Have a look at these.”
Tom took the tablet and studied the image. It depicted an aerial shot over snow-covered Antarctica. In the middle were three stunning blue lakes. Their brilliant shade of sapphire blue indicated the purity of the deep water forming above the ice. Tom recalled that the blue hue of the pure water was a common sight when he was in Antarctica searching for the man behind the Cassidy Project — it was caused by an intrinsic property of water that allowed only selective absorption and the scattering of white light. The effect here was beautiful, to say the least.
He smiled. “They’re quite magical.”
Sam nodded. “Truly stunning, if they weren’t so dangerous.”
“How so?”
“They’re known as supraglacial lakes and form as warm air heats the surface of an ice sheet to create a pond of meltwater. There are now more than eight thousand of them riddled throughout Antarctica like pockmarks.”
“They don’t belong there?”
“No. Such lakes are common in Greenland, silently eating away at the ice for more than thirty years, but are an entirely new phenomenon to Antarctica.” Sam took another drink of beer. “On the Langhovde Glacier in East Antarctica, these lakes have been draining into the floating ice below, which could have serious consequences for the stability of the entire ice shelf. In other cases, some of the fresh water has been documented to flow directly into the sea at the base of the glacier. This in turn has resulted in a massive influx of icy cold fresh water into salt water, which develops a tornado-like underwater current and further destroys the submerged glacier from below.”
“And this is all new?” Tom asked.
“The lakes were first discovered in 2010, but only in the past three months became so significant as to join each other through a series of rivers. The result of which has recently manifested in the calving of a piece of ice-shelf the size of Delaware from Larcen C, off the Antarctic Peninsula.”
“Go on.”
“In Australia, an entire ecosystem of Giant Kelp off the coast of Tasmania have been destroyed. Do you remember diving there nearly ten years ago, when we first searched for the Mahogany Ship?”
“How could I forget?” Tom’s eyes widened as he recalled the unique habitat. “What happened to it?”
“The East Australian Current, which is the Australian leg of the huge gyre that moves water around the Pacific, traditionally pushes warm water south along the coast of the mainland before turning east toward South America, and long before it hits Tasmania.”
Tom nodded. He knew the EAC well from his experience sailing the east coast of Australia. “With the recent shift in the magnetic poles something has gone awry?”
Sam nodded. “The warming global climate has discombobulated this once-reliable system. Huge eddies of hot, nutrient-poor water keep spinning down toward the Tasmanian coast. This in turn has caused it to become the fastest-warming body of water on Earth, its temperature rising at a speed of nearly three times that of the rest of the world’s oceans.”
Sam took another mouthful of beer and then continued. “The warming seas are now hot enough to support the spawning of the long-spined sea urchin, an invasive pest that scours the seafloor. Giant kelp normally booms and busts, ripped away by storms before reclaiming the territory. But now the urchins move in like plague-causing locusts, nibbling away the new strands of kelp before they can grow beyond their reach. The result is miles upon miles of bare rock, covered with black, spiny invaders.”
Tom closed his eyes and recalled the reef on which the kelp anchored itself, awash with color. Like some sort of unworldly creature, the Giant Kelp rose more than ninety feet from the seabed to the surface. Hues of red and orange glowed bright among the shifting tapestry of mustard, greens and browns.
He opened them again. “What a loss to the world…”
“It’s not just the Giant Kelp that’s been lost. An entire ecosystem has been destroyed with the loss of its habitat. Like the Eucalyptus trees that line Tasmania’s coastline above the water, the kelp themselves are a habitat. Nearly eighty percent of the marine animals are endemic to the area. With the destruction of their habitat, creatures as unique and strange as the Weedy Sea Dragon, often described as the delicate parrot of the kelp jungle, will also become extinct.”
Tom glanced at two divers who climbed out of the water. Both appeared unharmed. A slight nod from Sam indicated that neither was his attacker.
Sam said, “Heading farther north, the Great Barrier Reef, which has struggled with the global rise in sea temperatures over the past decade, suffered tremendously with coral bleaching affecting nearly seventy percent of is unique reef, stripping its coral of its vibrant colors and suffocating the living organisms that have taken nearly eight thousand years to reach their current size.”
“I’ve heard about the coral bleaching. Australia’s been struggling with it for years now. I read last year that the predicted cost to their tourism if the reef was completely destroyed would mount into trillions of dollars.”
Sam nodded. “It’s not just in the southern hemisphere the world’s having problems. There are a number of signs here in the north that the delicate balance of life on this Earth is teetering toward our destruction.”
“What else?”
“Closer to home. The United States, Canada and much of Europe have suffered more wildfires in the past three months than we have seen in the past decade. There have been multiple minor earthquakes…”