“Doesn’t that mean you guys could get some of that sweet, sweet petroleum money?” Gail wondered when he was bitching about grants. “Isn’t that how most geologists get funded?”
Most days they met for lunch at a Panera near campus. He’d show up late and find her curled up in a booth, eyes poring over whatever lit crit text she was abusing for her doctorate.
“Turns out our work puts us at odds with the predilections of the extraction interests.”
Her eyes widened. “Tony, no! Get the girls out of ExxonMobil Little Tots Academy right now.”
He snorted a bit of Diet Pepsi. Her jokes were so dorky.
The envelope’s return address did not pierce his concentration other than the “Louisville, KY” because he recalled that Scripps sometimes bought lab equipment from a manufacturer in Kentucky.
Tony always found himself detouring into the work of his pen pals in Melbourne—a team of researchers attempting to create a more precise estimate of the ocean’s total reserves. The largest reservoirs of hydrates could be found on continental shelves, mostly in coastal zones with high biological production and the right conditions of pressure and temperature. Given this, a map of deposits looked like his youngest, Catherine, had outlined the world’s continents in crayon. Off the East Siberian continental shelf alone lay an estimated 1,400 billion tons. In other words, the stuff was everywhere.
There was also a great deal of historical evidence that hydrates were more prevalent now than at any other time in Earth’s history. Because Earth had experienced a rather cool, temperate climate over the last few tens of millions of years, biological matter continued to form methane, freeze, and accumulate, uninterrupted by the planet’s periodic bursts of heat. Niko, in that assertive, unflappable (“a smidge chauvinist,” according to Gail) Greek way of his, never got tired of pointing out that the study of “how much” was the business of those petroleum geologists, not real scientists. Their only concern was “how warm.” He and Niko spent years mining clues from the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, which Tony now referred to as the “Pet’em” because of his older daughter, whom he usually called “Older One” as a solemn title of nobility.
In her heroic efforts to teach herself to read ahead of schedule, Holly had seen Tony perusing a book on the subject, which had used the common acronym PETM. She’d asked, “What’s a Pet’em?” He explained the Pet’em was the far less famous extinction event, a redheaded stepchild to the die-off that inspired Jurassic Park and the entire dino-subsection of pop culture for little boys.
“To understand the Pet’em,” he told her, “it’s instructive to first look at the end-Permian extinction.”
“What’s a redhead stop-child?” she asked.
The idiom proved more difficult to explain to a six-year-old than the mystery of the end-Permian, the event that wiped nearly all life off the face of the planet. Scientists thought that a million years’ worth of volcanic eruptions in Siberia was the likely culprit, but the math didn’t add up. The volcanoes simply couldn’t have produced enough carbon dioxide in a quick enough time span to raise the earth’s temperature six degrees Celsius. One had to account for all the light carbon found in rocks from the end-Permian. It was like the entire goddamn planet’s supply of coal had suddenly oxidized right into the atmosphere, but there weren’t a lot of coal miners running around back then, mostly just fish and bugs. Yet that light carbon was the reason 96 percent of life in the water and 70 percent of the land-based variety were wiped out almost overnight in geologic terms, clearing the plate for the dinosaurs. There remained only one desperado that could plausibly hold enough light carbon to explain the end-Permian extinction: methane hydrates. This explanation allowed the math to add up.
Cut to approximately 55 million years ago and the PETM, a more minor extinction event than either the end-Permian or the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. Yet the Pet’em certainly mattered to quite a few marine species that didn’t make it. The earth experienced a rapid heating of five to six degrees Celsius in only twenty thousand years. When you looked at sediments deposited during the Pet’em, you saw a massive spike in light carbon, which meant that something injected over three thousand gigatons in two quick bursts that each only took a few tens of thousands of years.
Again, the only explanation for this appeared to be a rapid melting of undersea methane hydrates.
Tony pinched open the metal clasp of the envelope and slid a finger beneath the fold to give it a quick, ineffectual tear that simply created a flap of paper. Nevertheless, there was a hole for his finger to work as he continued to study the data.
“Twice the hydrates melted,” he’d told Holly. “And twice there were catastrophic extinction events.”
So the question became: What caused the hydrates to melt in the first place? By looking at other PETM-like events in the Paleocene and Jurassic eras—and coupled with the end-Permian hypothesis—scientists had established that the hydrates did not melt due to some outside trigger, like a meteor strike, but rather an unambiguous feedback loop.
When the Earth warmed during climate oscillations caused by solar activity, widespread volcanic eruptions, or perturbations in Earth’s orbit, at a certain point the methane release occurred, spiking CH4 and CO2 levels in the atmosphere and raising the temperature even more. The best theory for how that worked involved ocean circulation: During the Pet’em, warmer, saltier water began flowing to the deep oceans, which in all likelihood began melting the top surface of hydrates. This exposed deeper reservoirs of hydrates, which in turn melted, exposing more. Why ocean circulation changed during these periods was still a mystery, but you didn’t need a doctorate from Yale to guess that the two-to-three-degree Celsius rise in global average temperature prior to the Pet’em probably had something to do with it. Luckily, it only took a little over one hundred thousand years for the carbon cycle to return that excess carbon to the earth, so the mammals of the day could get on with their humping and eventually produce humans.
Last summer he’d found himself on a Gulf Coast beach going mad trying to explain why this mattered to Gail’s obnoxious talk-radio-obsessed younger brother, Corey, who frequently directed his snide country-club snark toward Tony’s “mind-and-dick-numbing” job. On their first date when Gail explained she was adopted, Tony had pictured her younger brother as an enlightened liberal, proudly championing his biracial family. Corey, it turned out, was the type of adult who found it amusing to joke about Tony’s bald spot and old acne scars. Though the sun was setting, he felt his face grow hotter as he explained that given humanity’s little science experiment of pumping all the carbon it could find into the atmosphere ten times faster than during the PETM, it was probably worth figuring out how soon the goddamn hydrates might melt and turn Corey’s Sarasota beachfront condo into a pretty shitty fucking investment.
Gail shot him a look over the top of her sunglasses that said Play nice, and he again wondered if it was too late for his wife to un-adopt herself from her dynastic, self-consumed Floridian family.
He was somewhere here—among the numbers from the latest simulation and memories of their last trip to Florida and his brother-in-law and Catherine, whom he always called “Khaleesi” because it suited her magnetism and temper, either of which might be on display at her birthday party this weekend—when two things happened at once.
First, he aggregated what he’d read on the screen in the simulated clathrate analysis. Second, he turned his full attention to the envelope, which he succeeded in opening by using his finger as an impromptu letter opener. There was only one sheet of paper inside, and he pulled it out. The big block letters were similar to those of the address.