“So, the western ice sheet, there, was resting on bedrock below sea level. But the land down there is warm, and there are some under-ice volcanoes down there, and so the ice on the bottom gets melted a bit. This water mixes with sediments from the volcanoes, and forms a substance called till. It has a consistency kind of like toothpaste. Where the ice is riding over this till it moves faster than usual, so within the west ice sheet there were ice streams, like fast glaciers with their banks made of slower ice. Ice Stream B ran two meters a day, for instance, while the ice around it moved two meters a year. And B was fifty kilometers across, and a kilometer deep. So that was one hell of a river, running off with about half a dozen other ice streams into the Ross ice shelf.” He indicated these invisible streams with a fingertip.
“Now, where the ice streams and the ice sheet in general came off the bedrock, and started floating in the Ross Sea — that was called the grounding line.”
“Ah,” said one of Fort’s friends. “Global warming?”
The geologist shook his head. “Our global warming has had very little effect on all this. It’s raised temperatures and sea levels a little bit, but if that was all that was happening it wouldn’t make much difference here. The problem is we’re still in the interglacial warming that began at the end of the last Ice Age, and that warming sends what we call a thermal pulse down through the polar ice sheets. That pulse has been moving down for eight thousand years. And the grounding line of the west ice sheet has been moving inland for eight thousand years. And now one of the under-ice volcanoes down there is erupting. A major eruption. About three months old now. The grounding line had already started to retreat at an accelerated rate some years ago, and it was very close to the volcano that’s erupted. It looks like the eruption has brought the grounding line right to the volcano, and now ocean water is running between the ice sheet and the bedrock, right into an active eruption. And so the ice sheet is breaking up. Lifting up, sliding out into the Ross Sea, and being carried away by currents.”
His listeners stared at the little inflatable globe. By this time they were over Patagonia. The geologist answered their questions, pointing out features on the globe as he did. This kind of thing had happened before, he told them, and more than once. West Antarctica had been ocean, dry land, or ice sheet, many times in the millions of years since tectonic movement had deposited that continent in that position. And there appeared to be several unstable points in the long-term temperature changes — “instability triggers,” he called them, causing massive changes in a matter of years. “This climatological stuff is practically instantaneous as far as geologists are concerned. Like, there’s good evidence in the Greenland ice sheet that one time we went from glacial to interglacial in three years.” The geologist shook his head.
“And these ice sheet breakups?” Fort asked.
“Well, we think they might go typically in a couple hundred years, which is still very fast, mind you. A trigger event. But this time the volcano eruption makes it much worse. Hey look, there’s the Banana Belt.”
He pointed down, and across Drake Strait they saw a narrow icy mountainous peninsula, pointing in the same direction as the coccyx of Tierra del Fuego.
The pilot banked to the right, then more gently to the left, beginning a wide lazy turn. Below them as they stared down was the familiar image of Antarctica as seen in satellite photos, but everything was now brilliantly colored and articulated: the cobalt blue of the ocean, the daisy chain of cyclonic cloud systems spinning away to the north, the textured sheen of the sun on the water, the great gleaming mass of the ice, and the flotillas of tiny icebergs, so white in the blue.
But the familiar Q shape of the continent was now strangely mottled in the area behind the comma of the Antarctic peninsula, with gaping blue-black cracks in the white. And the Ross Sea was even more fractured, by long ocean-blue fjords, and a radial pattern of turquoise-blue cracks; and offshore from the Ross Sea, floating up toward the South Pacific, were some tabular icebergs that were like pieces of the continent itself, sailing away. The biggest one looked to be about the same size as New Zealand’s South Island, or even bigger.
After they had pointed out the biggest tabular bergs to each other, and the various features of the broken and reduced western ice sheet (the geologist indicated where he thought the volcano under the ice was, but it looked no different from the rest of the sheet), they simply sat in their seats and watched.
“That’s the Ronne ice shelf, there,” the geologist said after a while, “and the Weddell Sea. Yeah, there’s some slippage down into it too…. Up there’s where McMurdo used to be, on the far side of the Ross ice shelf. Ice was pushed across the bay and ran up over the settlement.”
The pilot started a second lap around the continent.
Fort said, “Now say again what effect this will have?”
“Well, theoretical models have world sea levels rising about six meters.”
“Six meters!”
“Well, it will take a few years for the full rise, but it’s definitely started. This catastrophic break will raise sea levels about two or three meters, in a matter of weeks. What’s left of the sheet will be afloat in a matter of months, or a few years at most, and that will add another three meters.”
“How could it raise the whole ocean that much?”
“It’s a lot of ice.”
“It can’t be that much ice!”
“Yes it can. That’s most of the fresh water in the world, right down there under us. Just be thankful the East Antarctic ice sheet is nice and stable. If it were to slide off, sea levels would rise sixty meters.”
“Six meters is plenty,” Fort said.
They finished another lap. The pilot said, “We should be getting back.”
“That’s it for every beach in the world,” Fort said, pulling his face back from the window. Then: “I guess we’d better go get our stuff.”
When the Second Martian revolution began, Nadia was in the upper canyon of Shalbatana Vallis, north of Marineris. In a sense one could say that she started it.
She had left South Fossa temporarily to oversee the Shalbatana closure, which was similar to those over Nirgal Vallis and the east Hellas valleys: a long tent roof over a temperate ecology, with a stream running down the canyon floor, in this case supplied by pumping from the Lewis aquifer, 170 kilometers to the south. Shalbatana was a long series of lazy S’s, so that the valley floor looked very picturesque, but the construction of the roof had been complicated.
Nevertheless Nadia had directed the project with only one small part of her attention, the rest being focused on the cascading developments on Earth. She was in daily communication with her group in South Fossa, and with Art and Nirgal in Burroughs, and they kept her informed of all the latest news. She was particularly interested in the activities of the World Court, which was trying to establish itself as an arbitrator in the growing conflict of the Su-barashii metanats and the Group of Eleven against Praxis, Switzerland, and the developing China-India alliance — trying to function, as Art had put it, “as a sort of world court.” That effort had looked doomed when the fundamentalist riots began and the metanats prepared to defend themselves; and Nadia had concluded unhappily that things on Earth were about to spiral down into chaos again.
But all these crises were immediately cast into insignificance when Sax called to tell her of the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. She had taken his call at her desk in one of the construction trailers, and now she stared at his little face on the screen. “What do you mean, collapsed?”
“It’s lifted off the bedrock. There’s a volcano erupting. It’s being broken up by ocean currents.”
The video image he was sending cut to Punta Arena, a Chilean harbor town with its docks gone and its streets awash; then it cut again to Port Elizabeth in Azania, where the situation was much the same.
“How fast is it?” Nadia said. “Is it a tidal wave?”
“No. More like a very high tide.
That will never go away.”
“So enough time to evacuate,” Nadia said, “but not enough time to build anything. And you say six meters!”
“But only over the next few … no one is sure how long. I’ve seen estimates that as much as a quarter of the Terran population will be — affected.”
“I believe it. Oh, Sax …”
A worldwide stampede to higher ground. Nadia stared at the screen, feeling stunned as the scale of the catastrophe became clearer to her. Coastal cities would be awash. Six meters! She found it very hard to imagine that any possible ice mass could be so large as to raise the sea level of all Earth’s oceans by even as much as one meter — but six! It was shocking proof, if one needed it, that the Earth was not so big after all. Or else that the West Antarctic ice sheet was huge. Well, it had covered about a third of a continent, and was, the reports said, some three kilometers thick. That was a lot of ice. Sax was saying something about the East Antarctic ice sheet, which apparently was not threatened. She shook her head to clear it of this nattering, concentrated on the news. Bangladesh would have to be entirely evacuated; that was three hundred million people, not to mention the other coastal cities of India, like Calcutta, Madras, Bombay. Then London, Copenhagen, Istanbul, Amsterdam, New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami, Rio, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, Djakarta, Tokyo … and those were only the big ones. A lot of people lived on the coast, in a world already severely stressed by overpopulation and declining resources. And now all kinds of basic necessities were being drowned by salt water.
“Sax,” she said, “we should be helping them. Not just…” . “There is not that much we can do. And we can do that best if we’re free. First one, then the other.”
“You promise?”
“Yes,” he said, looking surprised. “I mean — I’ll do what I can.”
“That’s what I’m asking.” She thought it over. “You’ve got everything ready at your end?”
“Yes. We want to start with missile strikes against all surveillance and weapons satellites.”
“What about Kasei Vallis?”
“I’m dealing with it.”
“When do you want to start?”
“How about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow!”
“I have to deal with Kasei very soon. Conditions are good right now.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Let’s try to launch tomorrow. No sense wasting time.”
“My God,” Nadia said, thinking hard. “We’re about to go behind the sun?”
“Yes.”
This position vis-a-vis Earth was mostly a symbolic matter these days, as communications were assured by a great number of asteroid relays; but it did mean that it would take months for even the fastest shuttles to get from Earth to Mars.
Nadia took a deep breath, let it out. She said, “Let’s go, then.”
“I was hoping you would say that. I’ll call them in Burroughs and give them the word.”
“We’ll meet in Underbill?” This was their current rendezvous point in case of emergency; Sax was in a refuge in Da Vinci Crater where a lot of his missile silos were located, so both of them could get to Underbill in a day.
“Yes,” he said. “Tomorrow.” And he was gone.
And so she had started a revolution.
* * *
She found a news program running the satellite photo of Antarctic, and watched it in a kind of daze. Little voices on the screen chattered at speed, one claiming that the disaster was an act of ecotage perpetrated by ecoteurs from Praxis, who supposedly had drilled holes in the ice sheet and set hydrogen bombs down on the Antarctic bedrock. “Still at it!” she cried, disgusted. No other news shows made this assertion, or refuted it — it was just part of the chaos, no doubt, swept away by all the other accounts of the flood. But the metanatricide was still on. And they were part of it.
All existence immediately reduced itself to that, in a way sharply reminiscent of ‘61. She felt her stomach knotting as of old, tightening past any usual levels of tension, into an iron walnut at the center of her being, painful and constricting. She had been taking medicine recently to prevent ulcers, but it was woefully inadequate against this kind of assault. Come on, she told herself. Be calm. This is the moment. You’ve expected it, you’ve worked on it. You’ve laid the groundwork for it. Now came the chaos. At the heart of any phase change there was a zone of cascading recombinant chaos. But there were methods to read it, to deal with it.
She crossed the little mobile habitat, and glanced briefly down at the idyllic beauty of the canyon floor of Shalbatana, with its pebble-pink stream and the new trees, including strings of cotton-wood on the banks and islands. It was possible, if things went drastically wrong, that no one would ever inhabit Shalbatana Vallis, that it would remain an empty bubble world until mudstorms caved the roof in, or something in the mesocosmic ecology went awry. Well —
She shrugged and woke her crew, and told them to get ready to leave for Underbill. She told them why, and as they were all part of the resistance in one way or another, they cheered.
It was just after dawn, on what was looking to be a warm spring day, the kind that had allowed them to work in loose walkers and hoods and facemasks, with only the insulated hard boots to remind Nadia of the bulky clothing of the early years. Friday, Ls 101, 2 July 2, M-year 52, Terran date (she checked her wristpad) October 12, 2127. Somewhere near the hundredth anniversary of their arrival, though it was a date no one seemed to be celebrating. A hundred years! It was a bizarre thought.
Another July revolution, then, and another October revolution too. A decade past the bicentennial of the Bolshevik revolution, she seemed to remember. Which was another strange thought. Well, but they too had tried. All the revolutionaries, all through history. Mostly desperate peasants, fighting for their children’s lives. As in her Russia. So many in that bitter twentieth century, risking all to make a better life, and even so it had led to disaster. It was frightening — as if history were a series of human wave assaults on misery, failing time after time.
But the Russian in her, the cerebellum Siberian, decided to take the October date as a good auspice. Or a reminder of what not to do, if nothing else — along with ‘61. She could, in her Siberian mind, dedicate this time to all of them: to the heroic suffering of the Soviet catastrophe, to all her friends dead in ‘61, to Arkady and Alex and Sasha and Roald and Janet and Evgenia and Samantha, all of whom still haunted her dreams and her attenuated insomniac memories, spinning like electrons around the iron walnut inside her, warning her not to screw it up, to get it right this time, to redeem the meanings of their lives and their deaths. She remembered someone saying to her, “Next time you have a revolution you’d better try some other way.”
And now they were. But there were Marsfirst guerrilla units under Kasei’s command, out of contact with the headquarters in Burroughs, as well as a thousand other factors coming to Dear, most of them completely out of her control. Cascading recombinant chaos. So how different was it going to be?
She got her crew into rovers and over to the little piste station, some kilometers to the north of them. From there they rode in a freight train, on a mobile piste laid for the Shalbatana job, on to the main Sheffield-Burroughs line. Both those cities were metanat strongholds, and Nadia worried that they would take pains to secure the piste linking them. In that sense Underbill was strategically important, as occupying it would cut the piste. But for that very reason she wanted to get away from Underbill, and off the piste system entirely. She wanted to get into the air, as she had in ‘61 — all the instincts learned in those few months were trying to take over again, as if sixty-six years had not passed. And those instincts told her to hide.
As they glided southwest over the desert, shooting the gap between Ophir and Juventae chasmas, she kept her wristpad linked to Sax’s headquarters in Da Vinci Crater. Sax’s team of technicians were trying to imitate his dry style, but it was
obvious that they were just as excited as her young construction crew. About five of them got on the wrist at once to tell her that they had set off a barrage of the surface-to-space missiles which Sax had arranged to have placed in hidden equatorial silos over the past decade, and this barrage had gone off like a fireworks display, and had knocked out all of the orbiting metanat weapons platforms that they knew of, and many of their communications satellites as well. “We got eighty percent of them in the first wave! — We sent up our own communications satellites! — Now we’re dealing with them on a case-by-case basis—”
Nadia interrupted. “Are your satellites working?”
“We think they’re fine! We can only tell for sure after a full test, and everyone’s kind of busy right now.”
“Let’s try one out now. And some of you make that a priority, you understand? We need a redundant system, a very redundant system.”
She clicked off and tapped out one of the frequency and encryption codes Sax had given her. A few seconds later she was talking to Zeyk, who was in Odessa, helping to coordinate activities in the Hellas Basin. Everything there was going according to plan so far, he said; of course they were only a few hours into it, but it looked like- Michel and Maya’s organizing there had paid off, because all the cell members in Odessa had poured into the streets and told people what was happening, sparking a spontaneous mass work stoppage and demonstration. They were in the process of closing down the train station, and occupying the corniche and most other public spaces, in a strike that looked like it would soon be a takeover. The Transitional Authority personnel in the city were retreating to the train station or the physical plant, as Zeyk had hoped they would. “When most of them are inside we’re going to override the plant’s AI, and then it’ll become a jail holding them. We’ve got control of the backup life-support systems for the town, so there’s very little they can do, except maybe blow themselves up, but we don’t think they’ll do that. A lot of the UNTA people here are Syrians under Niazi, and I’m talking to Rashid while we try to disable the physical plant from the outside, just to make sure no one in there can decide to become a martyr.”
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