Steve Alten - The Mayan Resurrection

‘Wait… this thing will arrive in seven days?’

‘No, I said the wormhole’s closest mouth will pass near Mars in seven days. To rendezvous in time means we’ll have to leave Earth in ninety-eight hours.’

Immanuel swallows back the bile rising from his throat. ‘No way… no fubitshitting goddam way, Jacob Gabriel!’

‘Manny-’

‘No!’ The dark-haired twin bolts out of the control room, then races down the passageway, searching for the camouflaged exit. ‘Open up, goddam it! Jacob, let me out! I can’t breathe!’

A panel retracts, revealing the gantry and the inside of the warehouse. He looks down to see the lift rising slowly to meet him.

Desperate to escape, he leaps forward and grabs hold of one of the aluminum tower’s horizontal support beams, using it like a fireman’s pole to descend quickly to the concrete floor – the armed guards already in position as he reaches the bottom.

Meteorology Lab, University of Miami

Tuesday Evening

The Meteorology Center on the University of Miami’s main campus is the latest in a new line of ESD (Environmental Shield Designs) sprouting up along the eastern seaboard of the United States. The building has a second exterior consisting of a domed outer shell, composed of reinforced concrete and steel, designed to withstand hurricane winds up to 220 miles an hour. Inside this barrier is the mainframe, each door and window housing retractable steel shutters that seal automatically at the touch of a switch. Backup generators situated on the first floor can power the entire thousand-room building for two weeks, while satellite relays, wired directly into the curved roof, provide ample reception for the Center’s lines of communication.

Besides its role as a teaching facility, the Meteorology Center also serves as the United States southeast regional headquarters for the Earth Systems Management Agency, an organization that assesses, predicts, and monitors all environmental catastrophes across the globe.

Bruce Doyle rubs his sleep-deprived eyes, then drains the remains of his now-cold coffee. Although the effects of global warming had become increasingly apparent as early as the late 1980s, the U.S. government’s response to the problem was too little, coming too late. Doyle, the regional director of the ESMA, often equates the public’s delay with sticking one’s hand in a pot of cold water on a simmering stove. Because the changes in temperature happen so gradually, the victim never realizes the danger until flesh starts peeling away from the bone.

Doyle shakes his head in disbelief as he glances at the Winter 2033 ESMA QUARTERLY REPORT. Colder winters and hotter summers-that has been the pattern over the last thirty years, and the effects around the globe seem to be magnifying. More than 100 billion tons of water are being released from the Greenland Ice Sheet each year, doubling the melting rate from only two decades earlier, while raising sea levels another four inches. Millions of people living in low-lying lands have been displaced, from Bangladesh to Egypt. Outbreaks of malaria, dengue, and yellow fever continue moving farther north with each passing season. Storms and floods have washed away crops. Droughts and fires destroy more than 10 million hectares of forests a year. Summer heat waves have led to the deaths of thousands, while vanquishing countless plant and animal species into extinction.

And according to the QUARTERLY REPORT, things are getting worse.

The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet is continuing to melt at an alarming rate. The ice sheet, which rests on a bed far below sea level, contains nearly 2 million cubic miles of ice. Scientists now know that all marine-based ice sheets have melted within the last twenty thousand years. If the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet were to go, world ocean levels would rise, and not just by inches, but by more than twenty feet.

More severe weather patterns are also taking their toll. Typhoons and hurricanes are not only appearing later in their seasons, but elevated ocean temperatures have increased their intensity, especially in the North Atlantic.

The power train behind our planet’s storm systems is the oceans, which provide energy both by direct heat transfer from their warm surface and by the evaporation of water. Tropical cyclogenesis takes place when the atmosphere takes on heat and moisture from warm surface waters (at least eighty degrees Fahrenheit to depths of about 150 feet). As latent heat in the form of water vapor is drawn up from the ocean, the thunderstorm’s cyclonic surface winds cause it to spiral counterclockwise (clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere). As the storm system strengthens and hurricane-force winds are achieved, inward-moving air turns upward and outward, creating an eye, a center of calm usually twenty to forty miles in diameter. The heat energy generated by the evaporation process is stored in the form of water vapor, which rises in a ring of towering cumulonimbus clouds surrounding the calm eye of the cyclone. The eye itself is composed of slowly sinking warm air while the eye wall is a strong upward flow of air created by a moderate to strong low-level convergence of air.

A medium-sized hurricane releases enough energy in a single day as the simultaneous explosion of four hundred twenty-megaton hydrogen bombs-or more than half the electric energy used by the United States population in an entire year. Hurricanes (cyclones forming in the Atlantic) are rated using the Saffir-Simpson Scale, which categorizes storms based upon their maximum sustained winds. A tropical storm officially graduates to a Category-1 hurricane when its winds are clocked at 74-95 mph. A Category-5 storms packs winds of 156-plus miles per hour.

By the late 1990s, the effects of global warming made themselves known through hotter summers and colder winters, intensifying weather systems across the globe. The initial effects on hurricanes were tempered with the arrival of an El Nino cycle, a circulation pattern where pools of warm surface water and air pressure in the tropical western Pacific roll back and forth across ten thousand miles of ocean. While El Nino brought increased rainfall across the southern United States, its high winds sheared off the northern edges of hurricanes, sparing the East Coast.

From the mid-1970s to 1998, El Nino dominated weather patterns across North America. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that the first real effects of global warming suddenly became alarming.

La Nina-the little girl-is the flip side of the El Nino southern oscillation cycle. Many meteorologists classify the shift as a ‘cold event’ as La Nina cools ocean temperatures along the West Coast of the U.S. The effect of this phenomenon on the long-wave circulation pattern is to produce an upper air trough over the central United States, with a southerly flow over the East Coast-feeding virtually every low-pressure system coming across the Atlantic.

In late August of 2007, Hurricane Susan jumped from a Category-4 to a Category-5 storm as it approached the U.S. mainland. As an awestruck nation watched helplessly, the storm’s sustained winds reached 189 miles an hour just before its eye snaked across Savannah, Georgia, The ESMA’s early warnings helped keep Susan’s death toll below a dozen, but the killer storm’s winds (which spawned seven tornadoes) caused more than 4 billion dollars in damages.

So powerful was Susan that it forced the ESMA to add an additional classification to the Saffir-Simpson Scale. A Category-6 storm (or super-cane) was now regarded as a La Nina-induced hurricane packing winds in excess of 175 mph.

Less than a year later, Super-Cane Abigail, the first official Category-6 storm, made landfall in Vero Beach, Florida. The system’s storm surge would rise thirty-four feet above sea level, flooding coastal areas from West Palm Beach up to Daytona, then clear across the Florida panhandle.