Liz Jensen - The Rapture

Kristin gets up. ‘I’m going to get Frazer. I think he should be in on this.’ Something has finally got through to her. Good.

‘You were pretty tough on her there,’ says Ned, when she has gone. ‘Tougher than you were with me. And I was the one who kidnapped Bethany.’

I don’t answer. If he’s blind and stupid, then that’s his problem.

As Ned Rappaport scrolls through a list of images, I shift my legs into a new position on the chaise-longue. I will need all my strength to face the physicist again.

‘OK. Here are all the offshore rigs that we know are already experimenting with exploiting methane, plus ten that we suspect are converting from oil or gas production.’ With a click, the whiteboard is filled with a patchwork of images of ocean rigs, their platform scaffolds and spire-like derricks rearing from the sea: bleak constructions of iron and concrete, pounded by stormy seas or blanketed with snow or parked in sunlight in the iridescent turquoise of tropical waters, seemingly far from any coast. ‘The derricks are all bare metal but as you can see the lifting cranes come in all colours, just like cranes on land. I gather Bethany says the one we’re after is yellow, so…’ He shrinks the patchwork to several tighter images. On each of them stands a canary-coloured crane, several new-looking, but most with flaking paintwork. ‘Of these eight here, the three off the coasts of China, India and New Zealand are closed for machine refits, and one of the Russian ones hasn’t been operational for the past year. That leaves us with four suspects.’ He clicks again, quartering the whiteboard. ‘Buried Hope Alpha in the North Sea, Mirage in Indonesian waters, Lost World in the Caribbean, and Endgame Beta off the coast of Siberia. For various reasons to do with chronic mismanagement, my hunch is Endgame Beta.’

Frazer Melville and Kristin Jons dottir are talking animatedly as they enter the room.

‘Any luck with Harish?’ asks Ned. They look at one another and make a joint decision.

‘Some. But let’s talk Gabrielle through this first,’ says Frazer Melville.

He and Kristin Jons dottir position themselves on either side of me: he on one edge of the chaise-longue, and she on a chair to my left. Trapped, I give the whiteboard my full attention. Until this moment I have not paid offshore rigs a single thought.

‘They look heroic.’

‘They are,’ responds Frazer Melville, as though my remark is the correct answer to a secret, unuttered question. ‘All that human ingenuity and ambition. All that aspiration.’ It is almost like the beginning of the kind of conversation we used to have, in the days when we talked. ‘Until Bethany can give us more information we have to assume it’s any one of them. Now, if the submarine crack Bethany saw—’

He shifts closer to me on the edge of the chaise-longue. I lean away. But he is still close. I can feel the heat of his body.

‘That’s what she drew?’ I ask. I’m barely able to concentrate but I need to sound normal, for the sake of my own pride. ‘A crack?’

‘A fissure and a flashpoint,’ says Kristin Jons dottir. ‘To free the frozen methane from the ocean floor, they’ll have drilled beneath it horizontally and forced a pressure-change. But if they’ve miscalculated what’s down there, and the interference has widened the gap that’s already there, the pressure will build up. When it reaches a critical point, there’s a risk that huge amounts of this frozen methane — far more than they ever intended — could be unleashed.’

As she speaks, I am aware that Frazer Melville is trying to make further eye contact with me, but I resist. I wonder if Kristin told him about my hostility towards her, or whether other matters — like the phone call to Harish Modak — took precedence.

Ned says, ‘The sediment will destabilise and trigger a submarine avalanche. Possibly leading to the release of the entire methane reserve buried under the explored hydrate field. Thereby removing vast amounts of sediment above and adjacent to the methane. Creating further cascades across the whole area. In the case of any of these rigs, we’re talking about thousands of square kilometres. Followed by a huge tsunami. Which is likely to destabilise more sediment packages, leading to more massive landslides.’

With their scientific knowledge, the three others here can no doubt picture the whole delta-shaped flow chart of the disaster’s repercussions. But I am unable to. Instead, I envisage an oil painting in the style of Turner, a vast and magisterial canvas that depicts a churning miasma of water and wave and cloud: of pale, mother-of-pearl light that transforms into rose, then tangerine, then blood-red as the spume froths and bubbles and explodes into flame; in the foreground, the matchstick scaffold of a rig toppled by the force of colliding elements.

Which is not much use, except as an aesthetic comfort.

No: the information I am getting isn’t sinking in the way it should.

‘Which in turn is highly likely to trigger a further cycle of landslides and more tsunamis,’ says Ned. ‘With more of the hydrate field being dislodged and releasing more methane. Methane is ten times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than C02. If the whole thing spreads and escalates, we get runaway global warming on a scale that’s beyond anyone’s worst nightmare. Everywhere will be radically hotter. It used to be called the clathrate gun hypothesis. Back when it was only a hypothesis.’

The physicist is looking at me intensely, as if trying to gauge how much is getting through. Not much is. ‘Last time, geologically speaking, it happened as fast as the flick of a switch.’

They all have their eyes on me.

‘So we have to do what we can to warn people,’ says Kristin Jons dottir. ‘There’ll be huge coastal flooding. Not just locally. With the domino effect, within a very short time we’re talking about the whole globe.’ She blinks. ‘Scandinavians call it Rag-narok.’

‘Chaos,’ says Frazer Melville. ‘A kind of Hell.’ My heart shrinks to a tiny hard marble. What does he want: my approval? Ned flicks to the next image, of the Earth, spinning slowly and transmogrifying with each turn.

‘The last time it happened, glaciers melted, huge areas were flooded. There were mass extinctions. This time, whether it’s triggered off the coast of Siberia or Indonesia or Florida, it won’t just be that region that’s affected. It’ll flash-heat the whole planet. Imagine a cataclysm on a scale that humans have never seen before.’

I can’t. Not even with the Earth spinning in front of me, its white and blue and green patches shifting and melding into one another like a giant ball of plasticine.

‘But wouldn’t the energy company that owns it know about it?’ I can hear my own stubbornness. Denial, for now, feels like an appropriate response. They are all being absurd. It’s science fiction. The fact that there are precedents for such a catastrophe is irrelevant. These things may have happened in prehistory, but they can’t happen in the age of man. Nature can’t just destroy civilisation. We’ve come too far. We can cope with things on this scale nowadays. We can prepare for them.

Ned says, ‘There might not be any visible signs at this stage. But even if the company does know, it might not want to publicise it. Especially if it’s corrupt and mismanaged. There are plenty of those, believe me.’

‘It might try to contain it,’ I say. But even as I say it, I can hear the absurdity.

One side of my face feels hot, as though my body is registering what my brain is failing to. A moment passes. Kristin Jons dottir walks over to the window, re-angles the slats on one of the blinds, and stares out. Ned is clicking at his laptop, and the physicist, perhaps finally taking the hint that I want no more to do with him, is staring fixedly at the images on the whiteboard. Outside, a plane scrapes a white arc across the sky, leaving a delicate snail-trail of vapour.