A proud, sentimental look came over his face.
“Diligent girl, Cynthia was. Most of her contemporaries would have just tagged the oddball species with some incorrect but convenient name and moved on. But not her. She kept at it until she found the right culprit.”
“What was the univerra strain used for?” Garner asked.
“Cleaning up radionuclides with a long half-life,” Alvarez said. “Specifically plutonium, cesium, and strontium.”
The realization dawned on Garner and Junko in an instant.
“I’d say that deserves a ‘eureka,” ” Garner said.
“Maybe even a ‘hot damn,” ” Junko agreed.
“Indeed.” Alvarez nodded. “And as you know, historically, the Soviets were tight-lipped about their nuclear program. Much of their literature was sealed away for fifty years, including their work with Thiouni. Even today, it might not be a matter of public record, except there seems to be a movement afoot to share the extent of their environmental problems with the rest of the world — for a price.”
“They have to,” Junko said. “They don’t have the technology or the money to dig themselves out of the problems they’ve created. At least their situation provides a good model for others not to follow. More than one nuclear policy wonk has suggested Russia’s threat to reopen Chernobyl is just a bargaining tactic to get funding from the West for new power plants.”
“I hope they don’t scrap the old ways entirely,” Alvarez said, “because I think they were onto something with this bug. They tinkered around with a natural culture of ferrooxidans until it acquired a taste for radionuclides in addition to naturally occurring isotopes. The idea was to use the hearty little beast to help clean up the wastewater from their bomb factories and weapons arsenals.”
“Almost like the use of Thiobacillus ferrooxidans in solution mining for uranium,” Junko added. “In India, Thiobacillus was naturally present. It weaned itself on radionuclides and leached them out of the bedrock by bonding them in solution. It’s a very promising area, but there’s still a worry about groundwater contamination.”
“Hats off to the Indians for the effort anyway,” Alvarez said. “The Soviets were never able to get their experiments to work on a large scale. Of course, they were speculating with much larger amounts of nuclear material.”
“So how could Thiouni find its way from a Soviet lab into Icelandic coastal waters,” Junko asked, “much less into the Canadian Arctic?”
“No problem at all,” Alvarez said.
“Heat,” Garner speculated.
“Precisely,” Alvarez said. “The heat of volcanism around Iceland, and the heat of your mysterious radiogenic source up north.”
Garner recalled his conversation with Scott Krail.
“The Soviets reportedly ditched some of their obsolete nuclear submarines directly into the North Atlantic, not to mention those that had reactor explosions or any number of assorted accidents. It isn’t far-fetched to think they tried to neutralize their accidents with something like Thiouni.”
“For all we know, they could have been culturing bacteria from magma-heated water,” Alvarez added. “Following that, it wouldn’t take much to introduce the bacterium into the environment as an exotic species. As you probably know by now, the little beast grows remarkably well under favorable conditions.”
“A classic case of natural selection,” Garner said. “Once introduced into nature, the univerra strain thrives in warmer locations because anywhere else is too cold to support it. But I still doubt Thiouni could be naturally present in such abundance where we’ve found it, even with a good supply of sulfide minerals as food.”
“Maybe not,” Alvarez admitted. “But as you see, a lot of potential good could come from this strain.”
Junko agreed.
“The Kola Peninsula, where the Soviet nuclear fleet was based, has had countless spills and an enormous stockpile of abandoned nuclear fuel. A chemical processing facility in the Ural Mountains is attempting to recycle some of their reactor products, but in general they don’t have modern equipment or the funds in place for proper disposal.”
“So I understand,” said Alvarez. “Millions of gallons of radioactive water and hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of solid wastes, all in need of decontamination. Even fifty years ago, they knew they would have to find natural mechanisms to clean up their dump sites. Lowtech solutions that didn’t require the transport or redistribution of unstable containers. Planting aspen trees along contaminated rivers was one idea; using Thiouni in digesting ponds was another. I’ve kept an eye out for Thiouni’s triumphant return to the literature, only to be disappointed.”
“This looks like the ideal facility to put their theoretical work to the test,” Garner said to Alvarez. “Why haven’t you taken up the cause of univerra yourself?”
Alvarez laughed.
“If only I had the time and energy,” he said. “The study of Thiouni was, briefly, fascinating to me. Then I took a look at my desk! It seems there’s always another monograph in need of revision, another class in need of an instructor, or a dozen other projects I could list.”
“Sounds like you could use a computer,” Junko teased.
“Perhaps. In my next career,” Alvarez said with a wry smile.
“If Thiouni is turning up off Baffin Island,” Garner said, “we may get a crack at your proof of concept sooner than that.”
“Whatever became of your student’s research?” Junko asked. She noted that Alvarez referred to his student and her work in the past tense.
“Very sad case there,” Alvarez chuckled again. “As she was writing up her thesis, the poor girl fell in love with a premed student. Despite her obvious abilities, she lost interest in science and dropped out to be a… a… homemaker and mother. Oh, she graduated, of course. Won accolades for her student research, but never bothered to publish it. Six hundred pages of meticulously identified and cataloged species — enough to fill a monograph unto itself — all practically unused. What price, love.”
“I’d like to see a copy of her manuscript,” Garner said. Alvarez located the bound thesis — Phytoplankton Assemblages of Iceland and Southern Greenland by Cynthia Marie Grogan — amid three dozen others on a designated library shelf in the lab. As Garner thumbed through the manuscript, its potential value was immediately apparent. Although the data were nearly six years old, Grogan had carried out extensive observations over nearly three full years before that.
Included among the extensive list of figures were several diagrams showing seasonal fluctuations in Ulva density with water temperature and current speed.
The annual fluctuation in natural phytoplankton density appeared to be very slight, providing a good set of parameters to begin studying the curious interaction between Ulva morina and Thiouni.
Garner managed to skim about half of Grogan’s manuscript before nodding off to a restless sleep on Alvarez’s guest sofa. He awoke with a start only three hours later. Junko was sleeping, curled up on the cot under a musty wool blanket.
Alvarez himself had assisted them until 2:00 a.m. then gone home, leaving a note that he would return with a bag of bagels and fresh coffee for breakfast. As he had done aboard the Phoenix, Garner prepared a series of petri dishes in Alvarez’s lab to replicate the uptake of the radionuclides by the Thiouni. The bacterium once again managed to absorb virtually all of the plutonium, strontium, and cesium present in the seawater.