William Meikle: The Creeping Kelp

Dave Noble had just pulled up the last but one of his sample bottles when thin, grey smoke began to waft from the four-stroke engine of the Zodiac.

That’s all I need.

He had to clamber over the bottles to reach the helm, barking his shin on the raised fibreglass ridge that bisected the dinghy. He cursed, long and loudly. It didn’t make him feel much better.

The smoke had turned darker now and the engine rattled and whined. He switched it off and pushed the button that raised the propeller from the water. The dinghy seemed stable enough in the water, so he risked leaving the steering wheel and headed to the rear for a closer look. Black, almost oily goop hung from the blades in ropy strands.

Blasted weed.

At first glance, this particular area of the North Atlantic seemed serene; a sheet of blue glass laid under an azure sky, the water only intermittently ruffled by a breeze so faint it could hardly be felt; the water gently lapping on the side of the dinghy. But after two weeks of study, Noble knew that the surface hid a multitude of sins.

And all of them caused by the activities of a technological society.

The rotational currents created by the North Atlantic Gyre drew in waste material, mainly plastic bottles, from the coastal waters off both North Africa and Western Europe. As this material is captured, wind-driven currents gradually move the debris toward a certain area of the ocean, trapping it inside swirling vortices. Once there, they coagulate into ever-thickening soup of degrading plastic that now pollutes an area the size of Wales.

And things aren’t getting any better.

This was the study team – and Noble’s third year in the area. It was already obvious that the amount of plastic suspended in the water had increased rapidly in the last twelve months . Indeed, in many areas of the affected region, the overall concentration of plastics was greater than the concentration of plankton. Plastic was now the main item on the menu across the whole ecological niche. It was not yet apparent what effect this would have in the long term, but Noble suspected that no good would come of it. Fishermen were already reporting strange mutations turning up at intervals in their catches and even the Herring Gulls, supreme scavengers as they were, stayed well away from this stretch of water. Noble believed that it was only a matter of years before the whole place became an aquatic desert, no less dead than the sands of the Sahara.

He had more to worry about at this moment though. The black goop proved resistant to all his attempts to scrape it from the propeller blades, even when he took the edge of a knife to it – all he accomplished was to get his blade coated in a black tar that stuck hard like super-glue. That brought on another bout of cursing.

Let’s just get back home. The tech boys can deal with it.

When he turned the engine on it whined with a high whistle. More dark smoke rose from inside the casing. The engine wasn’t going to last long in that condition. Noble chose discretion over more sampling and turned the Zodiac back towards the main research vessel.

Earth Rescue sat in quiet water nearly a mile away. Before he was halfway there the engine started to screech and belch smoke like an old banger on its last legs. He tried to keep the dinghy on a straight line, but it pulled sharply to port, so much so that he was forced to tack as if he was on a yacht under full sail. He was kept busy for the next five minutes wondering if at any moment he’d have to suffer the humiliation of being rescued. As the whine got louder and more urgent, the dinghy wallowed like a luxuriating hippo in mud.

As he got closer he could see some of the crew standing at the rail waiting for him. They all seemed to be laughing and enjoying themselves immensely. Noble cursed some more. This time it did make him feel better. He tacked to starboard again, having to point the prow almost at ninety degrees to Earth Rescue.

In the end, he just made it. As he threw a line to the waiting crew, the engine gave up with one last diminishing whine. Noble leaned over to check on it and spotted thick clumps of the black tarry substance floating just beneath the water line. He didn’t have time to investigate. He waited until they hauled the dinghy up onto the lower deck and then jumped down to the main vessel.

It was only then that he saw the full extent of the black tar. It coated the whole bottom of the Zodiac, an oily sludge nearly an inch thick. It was soft to the touch, but resisted any attempt to pull it away from where it clung.

“Oil spill?” Suzie Jukes asked from beside him.

He shook his head.

“Too thick. It looks more like decomposed weed or whale blubber that’s gone off. But in that case, wouldn’t it stink to high heaven?”

The woman jumped forward like an excited schoolgirl and tried to scrape a piece of the tarry substance away. It had already started to harden more in the heat out on the deck, becoming smooth and moulded to the fibreglass as if it had always been there. More than that, now it had begun to smell, the stench biting at Noble’s sinuses.

Suzie managed to cut some of the material away, but only at the cost of ripping a hole in the side of the dinghy. She lifted it to look closer and then had to back away, obviously affected by the smell.

Noble laughed, but then had to stop as the smell grew stronger still.

I’ve had enough.

“It’s all yours,” he grunted at the biologist and headed for the galley and the beer fridge. He was halfway down his second beer before he lost the sour taste in his throat and was considering a third when Suzie Jukes found him and almost dragged him out of his chair.

“Unless you’re taking me to bed,” he said. “I’d rather have another beer.”

“You’ve got to see this,” she said. It all came out of her in a rush, as if it had been bottled, shaken, and released. “The tar is a complex hydrocarbon all right. But it’s much more than that. It’s alive… or at least it was until you chewed it up. There’s Golgi apparatus and mitochondrial DNA, but no real cell wall structure to speak of. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before… like nothing anyone’s ever seen before. I think we’ve found an incipient species, one that’s evolving to take advantage of this unique ecosystem. In fact…”

By now she had him out of the chair and heading out of the galley.

“Whoa,” Noble said and managed a smile. “Information overload. Slow down.”

She stopped talking—but that only allowed her to drag him faster along the corridor.