The Last Odyssey (Sigma Force #15) - James Rollins Page 0,6
she asked with a shiver.
“Sorry.” His face cracked into a huge smile, his green eyes twinkling even in the foggy pall, which immediately made him look far younger. She guessed now he was only a couple of years older than her. She also suddenly remembered his name: Douglas MacNab.
“It’s all that activity that drew me up here two years ago,” he admitted. “Figured I’d better study it while I still can.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been working with NASA’s Operation IceBridge, which uses radar, laser altimeters, and high-resolution cameras to monitor Greenland’s glaciers. Specifically Helheim, which has retreated nearly three miles over the past two decades and shrunk three hundred feet in thickness. Helheim acts as a bellwether for all of Greenland. The entire place is melting six times faster than three decades ago.”
“And if all of the ice here vanished?”
He shrugged. “The meltwater from Greenland alone would lift sea levels by over twenty feet.”
That’s over two stories. She pictured her dig site in Egypt and the ancient ruins, half-drowned by the Mediterranean. Would that be the fate soon of many coastal cities?
A new voice intruded from the starboard side of the skiff. “Mac, quit being such an alarmist.” The thin, dark-haired man seated across from her sighed heavily. If there was a single word to describe him, it would be angular. He looked to be all sharp edges, from elbows and knees to the jut of his chin and high cheekbones.
“Even with current warming trends,” the man continued, “what you just described won’t happen for centuries, if ever. I’ve seen your data, and NASA’s, and run my own correlations and extrapolations. When it comes to climate and the cyclic nature of planetary temperature, the number of variables in play are too many to make firm—”
“C’mon, Nelson. I wouldn’t exactly consider your assessment to be unbiased. Allied Global Mining signs your paychecks.”
Elena studied the geologist anew. When she had been introduced to Conrad Nelson, he had made no mention of being employed by a mining company.
“And who funds your grant, Mac?” Nelson countered. “A consortium of environmental groups. That surely has no impact on your evaluation.”
“Data is data.”
“Really? Data can’t be skewed? It can’t be manipulated to support a biased position?”
“Of course, it can.”
Nelson sat straighter, clearly believing he’d made his point, but his opponent wasn’t done.
“I’ve seen AGM do it all the time,” MacNab finished.
Nelson raised a middle finger. “Then evaluate this.”
“Hmm, looks to me like you’re admitting I’m number one.”
Nelson scoffed and lowered his arm. “Like I warned you, data can be misinterpreted.”
The fog bank suddenly brightened around them and shredded to either side, revealing what lay ahead.
Nelson made his final point. “Look over there. Tell me we’re running out of glacier anytime soon.”
A hundred yards away the world ended in a wall of ice. The front of the glacier stretched as far as the eye could see. Its shattered face looked like the fortifications of a frozen castle, with hoar-frost encrusted parapets and crumbling towers. The morning sunlight fractured against its surface, revealing a spectrum running from the palest blue to a menacing blackness. Even the air scintillated with tiny ice particles, glittering and flashing as they approached.
“It’s massive,” Elena said, though the word failed to capture the breadth of the monster.
Mac’s smile widened. “Aye. Helheim stretches four miles wide and runs over a hundred miles inland. In places, the ice is over a mile deep. It’s one of the largest glaciers draining into the North Atlantic.”
“Yet, here it still stands,” Nelson said. “As it will for centuries.”
“Not when Greenland is losing three hundred gigatons of ice every year.”
“Doesn’t mean anything. Greenland’s ice sheet has ebbed and flowed. From one ice age to another.”
Elena tuned out the rest of their argument, especially as it grew more technical. Despite the ongoing debate, she sensed these two men were not enemies. Clearly the two enjoyed their sparring. It took a rare soul to survive this harsh place, which likely forged a commonality of spirit and ruggedness that bonded everyone, including these two scientists on opposite sides of the divide on climate change.
Instead, she turned her attention to her surroundings. She studied the silent bergs filling the channel. The skiff’s pilot—an Inuit elder with a leathery round face and unreadable black eyes—expertly navigated them through the maze, while puffing on an ivory pipe, giving each berg a wide berth. She soon discovered why. As one seemingly tiny iceberg capsized, flipping fully over, swinging up a massive shelf of ice, revealing how