“Right.”
“But what I don’t get,” said Angela, “is that the ice core sample they took wasn’t from under the ocean. It was from the permafrost which was under several feet of ice. So how did salt water get in there?”
“If the ice core sample had been taken far from the coastline, perhaps there would not have been an opportunity for it to mix with ocean water, you are right. But if you look at the geology of the area,” said Drew, pulling up a map of the area on his laptop screen, “the permafrost, which has been frozen for thousands of years, sits right up against the edge of the ocean. And we know the sample was thawing, which is why it broke so easily. If you look here, you can see that there’s ice on the top of the ocean, but underneath, it is all melting. Russ confirmed all of this when we spoke.”
Angela returned to her seat and began writing furiously in her notebook again.
“Exactly,” said Tally. “As best we can tell, the crews who worked there in the previous seasons were fortunate, but their luck may not hold out. Anyway, to confirm our hypothesis that the increasingly acidic ocean water could be affecting the virus, we decided to run another experiment.”
Sarah noticed Angela nod to Oscar in approval and felt a surge of gratefulness toward her investigators who were really shining in their presentations. For a completely impromptu meeting with these important people, things were going remarkably well.
“Working in a laminar flow hood in the BSL-4 lab, we isolated some virus particles and suspended them in ice, then ran a stream of ocean water over the ice. Then we exposed some HeLa cells to the viruses and measured the degree of virulence,” said Tally.
“It sounds… dangerous,” said Angela.
“Well, not that much, actually. The laminar flow at the entrance of the hood keeps all the microorganisms inside. And we were wearing full protective suits as well. So it was okay. But anyway, at first it didn’t work. We checked all of the cells and none got infected. So the next day we repeated the experiment except we added some water vapor to the mix, and bingo! The viral particles became virulent and infected the cells. So, the fact that there’s ice melting, and some of it must also sublime, you know, go straight from ice to vapor, is also important in increasing the pathogenicity of the virus.”
“What was your control?” asked Rhonda. Sarah had been about to ask the same question, and as she listened, time seemed to stand still for her. She was concentrating on what was being said. Many people thought that being an investigator involved many exciting moments such as these, with stimulating and intriguing information showing up, almost unbidden, and researchers leaping to great conclusions with little or no effort.
However, the truth was much more mundane. The vast majority of the time it took long, hard hours, days, weeks, months and years, and even then, more often than not, little progress was made. Experiments which seemed like they would shed a great deal of light on the situation often gave results which instead, opened up several more paths of questioning. And that’s when these experiments actually worked. All too often experiments failed when something went wrong with one of the apparatuses, or one of the ingredients in the cultivars, or, frustratingly, when the microorganisms just didn’t grow and behave as expected. Then the scientist had to go back to the beginning, painstakingly checking each and every step, and repeating perhaps months of experimental work. It was arduous and wearisome and every small step forward was questioned and examined lest there were problems with the controls or interpretation of the data. Thus conversations such as these were a rare treat indeed.
“We used two different controls, just in case: ocean water at the pH it was a hundred years ago and plain water. Both do a worse job of priming the virus capsid, and afterwards, when it actually makes contact with the cells, the virus takes a lot longer to infect them or does not infect them at all. So our conclusion is that the ocean water at today’s pH is doing something to the viral capsid to make it both more likely to become airborne as well as more permeable so it will be taken up more easily by the host cell,” said Drew, his long fingers fiddling with one of the buttons on his lab coat.
“The next thing we did,” said Tally, “was to test if perhaps part of the reason that the virus was becoming more active was due to the change in pH. So we exposed the virus to different weak acids to see if they acted on the capsid.”
She tapped some keys on her laptop and pulled up another Excel worksheet filled with data. Then she scrolled down until she had several graphs on the screen. “Here, can everyone see this?” she asked, hovering the mouse’s arrow over the graph that she was indicating.
Angela and Rhonda leaned in.
“We exposed the virus to different concentrations of Formic acid, Acetic acid, and Trichloroacetic acid. They did make the capsid more permeable, but not to a significant degree. So our conclusion for now is that it’s not just the acidity that’s having an effect on the virus, but also other components in the sea water,” said Tally, using the arrow to trace the various curves outlined in the graph. The curves were in different colors, each representing one of the different acids and the buffer that they had used as the control.
Rhonda and Angela nodded as they inspected the different concentrations of acid that Tally and Drew had used. Sarah realized her team must have surrendered their weekends to be able to have so many results to discuss. She felt proud of them for their perseverance, though she would definitely have to keep her promise about insisting that everyone take some time off after they finished the work on the Laptev virus.
“Just out of curiosity, anything on the radioactive waste that Shane mentioned?” asked Sarah, turning to look at Shane.
Emile scratched his head and spoke first. “Well, we can’t really say. There’s certainly a huge amount of it up in the Arctic Ocean. Shane did some research…”
“Yes,” said Shane who had started to raise his hand again, then caught himself and quickly lowered it. Sarah could tell he was excited to have something to contribute, and for her part, she just hoped he would keep it appropriate. “There are lots of submarines with uranium still sealed in their reactors—at least we hope they are still sealed. There are also quite a few nuclear dumps in the Kara Sea, which is right next to the Laptev Sea, just east of it. It’s crazy how much sh… I mean,” Shane said, blushing, “there’s tons of radioactive material there. I had no idea it was so much.”
“And Russ said that there are several oil companies planning to drill there, in the Kara Sea, I mean, in the near future. It’s quite a remote region, but you never know. It would be just their luck to go to drill and end up disturbing one of those toxic reservoirs,” said Drew.
Sarah saw Angela’s face darken at the mention of other oil companies. Obviously Drew’s comment had hit a sore spot. Then Oscar leaned over and whispered something to Angela. She shook her head and said in a soft voice, “No, we’re not going into the Kara Sea.”
“That’s smart,” said Shane, shamelessly addressing Oscar. “I’d stay the… I mean, well, I wouldn’t recommend going anywhere near there. I also discovered that there were a ton of ‘secret dumps.’ Reports that I read said there were 17,000 containers and more than a dozen ships with radioactive waste, and something like 14 nuclear reactors. The Russians have been dumping stuff up there for decades, pretty much unchecked.”
“Damn!” said Oscar, his brow surging skyward in surprise.
“Yeah,” said Shane, obviously enjoying himself once again. “It’s a ticking time bomb up there. I think they began dumping in the 1950s. And after all that time you know there’s gonna be stuff leaking, if there hasn’t already been stuff released. Things don’t stay put, you know. Not under those conditions, with the salt and the pressure of the weight of all that water. The ocean erodes things and all metal eventually succumbs.”