Stephen Baxter: Ark

She turned to her spinning crystal ball, the turning, three-dimensional Earth, a fool-the-eye illusion wrought by spinning screens, lenses and mirrors, and multiple projectors. Patrick remembered she had used a similar display back in 2018, and he wondered if this was the very same piece of equipment. Quite likely it was. “Here’s the Earth as we knew it before the inception of the flooding, back in 2012.” It was an image of a cloudless world, with the familiar shapes of the continents brown-gray against a blue ocean. “And here’s where we live now.” She pressed a control.

The seas glimmered and rose, and the land melted away. The water erased swathes of China, and washed across northern Europe deep into Russia, and in South America took a bite into Amazonia. Patrick’s eye was drawn to Britain, from which much of southern England had been lost, and the rest of the country reduced to an archipelago of highlands.

In North America the relentless sea had deleted Florida, and had swept inland to cover the east coast states as far as Maine, and the Gulf states as far north as Kentucky. In the west the ocean had pushed deep into the valleys of California. Great cities had been lost, abandoned: New York, Boston, New Orleans, even Washington DC. And with so much lost of the old United States east of the Ozarks there had been a massive population displacement. America was so terribly young, Patrick thought. It wasn’t much more than two centuries since the continent had been first crossed by the European settlers, and not much less since the great western migrations in search of land and gold. Now another vast flight to the west was under way.

Thandie went on, “I don’t need to detail for this group the economic dislocation that has unfolded, nor the tremendous human tragedy. A few months back I myself visited a huge refugee camp outside Amarillo, Texas. But I do want to point out how all this illustrates the accuracy of my modeling. When I spoke to the IPCC in 2018 the flooding had reached a mere thirteen meters above the old sea level datum, on average. At that time the scientific consensus was that the flooding couldn’t exceed eighty meters or so, because that was the upper bound from ice-cap melting. Well, just as my models predicted then, we have now reached a rise of around two hundred meters. The incremental rise is currently around thirty meters a year, and is following an exponential curve upwards. It seems clear the worst is yet to come, despite the denials of the scientific community and the governments. Regarding the source of the rise we have continued to gather data, and again every new piece of data has confirmed my tentative 2018 modeling.”

Thandie had established that the sea level rise was fueled not by melting ice but by ejections from subterranean seas, from lodes of water stored within the Earth. She produced images taken from undersea explorations of vast, turbulent, underwater fountains, places where hot, mineral-laden water was forcing its way out of the substrate, up from the depths of the rocky Earth itself.

Nobody knew why it should be just now that the deep reservoirs broke open. There had been dramatic and abrupt changes in Earth’s climatic state in the past. Maybe this was just another of those dramatic but natural transitions. Or maybe it was humanity’s fault.

“But in a real sense the cause doesn’t matter,” Thandie said, “and it’s futile to assign blame. Whatever the cause, we have to deal with the consequences. And from this point on those consequences are unknown. Up to now we have had some precedents to guide us. In the Cretaceous era, for instance, when the dinosaurs were still kicking around, Earth was warmer and wetter, and sea levels were much higher. Now we’re passing such precedents. We’ll soon be in an era when seas will be higher than at any time since the formation of the continents over two billion years ago.

“I’m aware that the federal government and other agencies continue to plan on the basis of the flood receding, of the possibility of recovery. Various departments are working on plans for the orderly recolonization of formerly drowned regions, for instance. I have to say I see no reason why the flooding should stop any time soon. Indeed we’re finding it hard to put an outer limit on the ultimate sea level rise. My best guess is that if the subsurface chambers we’ve discovered release all their water, we’ll end up with oceans five times the volume they had in 2010. All Earth’s land area will be lost long before that limit is reached, of course.” She let silence linger after that blunt statement.

Edward Kenzie nodded. “So, Dr. Jones, what do you think we should do?”

She shrugged. “You’ve three choices, as I see it. You plan for a life on the sea. Or under it. Or away from the Earth entirely.” Patrick found himself nodding at that last. “Oh,” Thandie said, “and you’ve around fifteen years to choose which, and implement your plan.”

“Why fifteen years?”

“Because in fifteen years Denver will be flooding.” She glanced around at the old library, the dusty calm, the sunlit air. “The water will be here. I guess whatever you’re going to do, you need to start now. Any more questions?”

After fifteen minutes of reasonably informed questions from the LaRei members, the presentation was over, and Thandie began to pack away her gear.

“One more question,” Patrick said. “What are your own future plans, Dr. Jones?”

She smiled. “To continue to observe. Events are unfolding which nobody has ever seen before, nor ever will again. I can’t have children. I have no stake in the future. But the present is rich enough for me.”

Once more Edward Kenzie stood up. “There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, as authoritative a picture as you’re going to get. Just like New York 2018 all over again, right? Now we get to the crux of the meeting. Since New York, thanks to the incompetence, denial and buck-passing of our governments, we’ve already wasted seven years. The resources the federal government has put into dealing with the worst case, a continued sea level rise, have been minimal compared to what’s been spent on the fanciful plans for recovery and recolonization to which Dr. Jones alluded. Well, I for one am not going to sit around dreaming while the rising sea obliterates my wealth and property and turns my family into drowned rats. Some of us are going to try and do something.”

There was a rumbling of support for that.

Kenzie held up his hands. “I, with the help of Nathan Lammockson and others, have brought here experts in a number of fields. Now’s your chance to talk to them, to start the seeds of your thinking about what you intend to do. What we need to consider is meaningful options for the worst case. I hope that out of this session will come a number of projects-a number of ark designs, if you will-that can proceed more or less independently of each other. That seems the way to maximize our chances of success. This is the inception of a program, not any one single project.

“But we’re going to have to proceed with extreme caution. Think about it. The Earth is drowning. Tell the world you’re building an ark, and every hapless IDP and his brood will be fighting for a place aboard.” He glared around at them, his face pinched and calculating. “I’m hoping we’re going to support each other in years to come. But we must work discreetly. We must keep our secrets- even from each other. We should each know only what we need to know about what the other guy is doing, like terrorist cells. Maybe that doesn’t sound very American. But we suffered enough from those terrorist assholes with their pinprick attacks ever since 2001. We may as well learn a few lessons from the way they operate, right?”