The Turing Test Read online

  Milne returned to his laptop and watched as the estimates of the depth of the slippage evolved. The more he saw, the worse it looked: all the data pointed to surface slippage. He grabbed his seat as a strong aftershock sent the truck sliding sideways on the ice.

  They were at higher ground now, and everyone piled out quickly. People gathered in small groups, looking out to sea, but Milne perched with his laptop on the edge of his bin, hoping for more data. But with no monitoring buoys closer to the epicenter than McMurdo Station was, he knew there was no way to learn what he wanted to know.

  Then he brought himself up short. There was a research team out on the Ross Ice Shelf, a trackless waste of ice almost the size of Texas. They were checking on the condition of a string of instruments spread across the ice sheet. How close to the ocean edge of the shelf were they? He tried to raise them on his satellite telephone, but there was no response. They must have gone back to sleep.

  He called the McMurdo Station manager, urging him to send a helicopter out immediately to pick them up. Then he set up his portable seismic monitoring unit and hooked it to his laptop. What he saw was confusing; the shockwaves passing under the ice must be rebounding between the bottom of the ice and the seafloor. But that didn’t explain everything he was seeing; some shocks didn’t result in the same echo effects. What could be causing them? It must be local activity of some kind.

  As he stared at the screen, another isolated shock registered. He watched as it propagated across the same line of instruments the field team was checking. Of course. The earthquake and its aftershocks would create cracks in the ice shelf. He felt another big aftershock beneath his feet. Almost immediately, his laptop revealed a cycle of tremors spreading from multiple points out on the ice shelf. The same cycle was repeating. He wondered how much of the ice shelf was becoming unstable. He looked up. There was a lot of talking and pointing going on.

  The convoy had dropped them on a ridge behind McMurdo Station. Looking down, he could see the buildings clustered between the rising ground and the harbor. From this distance, he could see significant damage. But that’s not what people were pointing at. Everyone was focusing on the horizon, out to sea.

  At first, he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Then a brilliant sparkle at the intersection of sea and sky caught his eye, and he noticed a line of tiny glimmers, like a string of diminutive Christmas lights strung across the horizon. Fascinated, he watched as the lights grew slowly larger. Then he could just make out a narrow, emerald green ribbon separating the sea and sky. Five minutes later, the band had grown and turned a beautiful jade green as it captured and refracted the polar sun from a new angle. The eerie silence and grace of its approach made it hard to appreciate the incredible power that was about to obliterate the buildings below.

  * * *

  The helicopter pilot throttled his engine down just enough to land almost on top of the three tents. He leaped out the moment the aircraft touched the ice, yelling “Out! Out! Out!” at the top of his lungs. A half-dozen groggy men stumbled from the tents.

  “Into the helicopter! Now! Don’t take anything! Just MOVE!” The pilot jumped back into his seat and kept yelling until the last startled researcher tumbled through the rear door. Before his passengers were in their seats, he gunned the engine and the helicopter swung into the air.

  The scientist in the passenger seat started to ask what the hell the emergency was, but the words froze in his mouth. Dead ahead was an enormous wave, so tall he couldn’t guess its height. The engine screamed as the pilot wrenched the stick around, struggling to turn and gain altitude before the towering wall of water reached them. The motion threw the scientist against the side of the aircraft as he watched, awestruck, as the wave crashed over the edge of the ice sheet and surged forward, eradicating their campsite and moving on, and on, and on, until at last it disappeared in the distance to the south.

  * * *

  Carson Bekin looked in the mirror and adjusted his tie. Time to once again face the jackals – sorry – gentlemen of the press.

  The cramped briefing room in the West Wing of the White House was packed with reporters. They leaned forward in anticipation as Bekin strode briskly up to the lectern. Each one, he knew, was aching to pose his or her very own special question, regardless of whether Bekin had already answered or, more likely, dodged the same query five times already.

  “Okay, folks, let’s get going,” Bekin said. “I’m going to start today by reading a brief statement from the president. Here goes:

  Over the past several weeks, an unprecedented series of heinous attacks has disabled, and in some cases, destroyed, a wide variety of energy-related infrastructure. From the start, this administration has placed the highest possible priority on meeting the challenge of this emergency. From the outset, the NSA, FBI, CIA, and DHS, among other agencies, have each been instructed to dedicate all resources necessary to this effort.

  We are also cooperating with the other nations most affected by these attacks, including China, the Russian Federation, India, and Japan. The degree of ongoing collaboration is unprecedented and ensures that all relevant information is shared immediately so that together we can bring a halt to the attacks.

  Finally, I am announcing today the formation of an independent, blue-ribbon panel of top cybersecurity experts in the private and public sectors. They will advise this administration and the investigating agencies and make recommendations for hardening critical infrastructure against attack. The names and backgrounds of the panel members will be distributed later today.

  You may rest assured that this administration will continue to do everything necessary to halt the shameful attacks that are disabling global energy infrastructure. We will not rest until those responsible have been found and brought to justice.

  “Okay. Questions?” Bekin pointed into the scrum of journalists. “Sarah?”

  A newspaper reporter held her notepad up and began reading.

  “Who does the government think is behind the attacks, and why haven’t they been apprehended yet? And finally, with all the money the U.S. has spent on cyber-resources, why shouldn’t the people expect faster progress?”

  “On your first question, we don’t have any new information or leads. On your second, same answer. On your third question, I’ll just observe that no other nation has made any more progress than we have.” Bekin pointed again, this time to a reporter from POX news. “Lee?”

  “Randal Wellhead, the Republican candidate for president, says if he were in office right now, the attackers would already have been caught. What’s the president’s response to that?”

  “Talk is easy. Results are tough. Next question – Tom. No, Tom from the Journal.”

  “The stock market has been in free fall this week. What’s the administration going to do about that?”

  “A free market is just that. It’s not the government’s job to interfere.” Oh well, might as well get this next one out of the way. He pointed to the reporter from Biteparts.com “Bill, your question.”

  “Regarding this new advisory panel. Isn’t setting up a blue-ribbon panel the oldest trick in the book? It makes it sound like the president’s doing something, but in reality, it’s all just for show.”

  “I don’t agree. These are the best experts in the business. The president has set a tight deadline for their recommendations, and he’ll give prompt and serious attention to what they say. Peter.”

  The reporter from the New York Post held his notepad up and began reading. “Who does the government think is launching these attacks? And why hasn’t the administration caught them yet? With the amount of money the president’s budgeted for cybersecurity, shouldn’t these guys have been caught weeks ago?”

  Bekin groaned inwardly and stole a glance at his watch. It was only ten minutes after nine. “On your first point …”

&nb
sp; * * *

  The project team was treated to a different type of report this week. Barker had pulled in an expert from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to brief them on the likely climate impact of the earthquake off Antarctica. Frank was pleasantly surprised to see the climatologist intersperse her technical slides with cool pictures of glaciers and such and even a few video clips. At the moment, she was speaking to a diagram showing a cross-section of an ice sheet.

  “This series of slides shows what happens when an ice sheet breaks up, as happened in 2002 on the other side of Antarctica when the Larsen B ice sheet collapsed. It broke up in less than a week. That was exceptionally fast, but the steps that led up to it took a couple of years to play out.

  “Here’s what happened in those steps.” They were looking at an aerial photo of the ice sheet now. “As we zoom in, you can see lots of cracks and crevasses. These defects form naturally in response to changing stresses in the ice sheet, but while it stays cold, they don’t undermine the integrity of the shelf very much. Let’s see what happens when things start to warm up, though.”

  She switched to an oblique aerial photo of a sheet of white ice peppered with countless blinding reflections of the sun.

  “Each one of those mirror-like spots is a meltwater pond. There are a lot more of them here than there would have been a few years before, and they’re bigger and last longer because of global warming.” She switched back to the cross-section diagram, which now showed the meltwater ponds on the surface. Some were above the downward cracks they’d seen in the diagram before. She clicked her control, and now the cracks under the ponds ran deeper and were wider at the surface, making the ponds and cracks resemble toadstools with long, narrowing stems.

  “As you’d expect, pooled water runs down and fills cracks, melting them wider. Later in the season, that water will freeze. When it does, it expands, and that leads to new stresses on the ice sheet. When this process continues over a period of years, the ice sheet grows weaker and weaker. What caused the Larsen B ice sheet to finally go was an earthquake thousands of miles away in the northern Pacific. The waves resulting from that quake were strong enough to set off a process that broke the whole ice sheet apart. After six days, an ice shelf almost the size of Rhode Island was floating out to sea in pieces.

  “Let’s talk about the Ross Ice Shelf now, which is far larger. Climate change was only beginning to affect the Ross Ice Shelf, so it was nowhere near as unstable as the Larsen B ice sheet just before it broke apart.

  “The difference is that last week’s earthquake was much, much closer and introduced a huge network of enormous cracks. Some of those crevasses extended for dozens of miles. Big aftershocks multiplied and spread those splits further, causing the entire structure to become progressively more unstable.

  “Then the tsunami hit, and that placed huge pressures on the ice from below even as it was spreading billions of tons of water over the top. The wave traveled more than fifty miles to the south before it began to recede, since there wasn’t much to stop it. That enormous, moving weight placed rapidly changing stresses on the ice sheet, causing the fractures already there to again run off even more miles in each direction and causing countless new ones. After that, the shelf was doomed.

  “Now let’s go back to our diagram and see what things looked like when the tsunami finally ran out of steam.” There were cracks everywhere now and wider. “All that water has to go somewhere, and a lot of it went into all those cracks and crevasses, where it acted like a lubricant, helping the shelf to become more and more unglued. It didn’t help that a major storm with near-hurricane force winds hit two days later.”

  They were looking at a satellite shot now of the edge of the Ross ice sheet. Except that it didn’t have a clean edge anymore. Instead, an enormous zone of broken ice filled the space between the open water and what remained of the shelf.

  “This was taken three days ago. The broken-up area you’re looking at is five hundred miles east to west and a hundred miles north to south.” She clicked to the next slide. “And this is the same area yesterday. The broken ice zone, of course, is still five hundred miles wide, because that’s how wide the Ross Sea is. But now it’s almost two hundred miles from open water to what’s left of the ice sheet. Everything in between is broken ice. By the end of the month, we expect almost the entire shelf will be broken up and heading out to sea.”

  She switched back to a slide. “Here’s a list of the secondary effects we anticipate from the event. The breakup of the shelf itself won’t affect sea levels, because the ice was already floating. But ice shelves act like giant dams, slowing down the rate of flow of the glaciers that feed them. Those glaciers are going to speed up now, and their ice will break off and float away when it reaches the ocean. Exactly how much they’ll speed up we don’t know. But two of the three glaciers behind the Larsen B ice sheet accelerated by 800% after the breakup, which is an enormous change.

  “Glacier ice wasn’t floating before, so every bit of it will contribute to rising sea levels. Worse yet, the same quake seems to have shaken things up at a recently discovered volcanic hot spot a half mile under the ice. From the seismic activity we’re detecting, we think it’s likely magma will reach the surface within a matter of weeks. When it does, it’s going to melt a lot of the overlying glacier.

  “All that water is going to super-lubricate the ice above it, as much as tripling its speed towards the ocean. Add that all up, and we expect a huge section of the ice field on land adjacent to the Ross Sea will slide into the ocean over the months and years ahead without the Ross Ice Shelf to slow it down. All by itself, that’s going to add two inches of rise to the oceans. And then there are the lesser but still significant effects, like the enormous amount of sunlight that will now be absorbed by, and heat up, open water and land instead of reflecting back into space.”

  The list of possible knock-on effects was impressive, with each building on and compounding the impact of the effects before it. All told, NOAA predicted an oceanic rise of 6.2 to 7.1 inches as direct and indirect results of the event.

  “So, when do you suppose the attacker will react?” Shannon asked Frank as they filed out of the meeting.

  “Pretty soon, I expect.”

  “Why not already? He hasn’t missed a single major event since the attacks started.”

  “I expect for the same reason the speaker from NOAA couldn’t provide a firm estimate of the impact. The attacker’s probably running his own figures to figure out what to attack. Or maybe he never does and just waits for a knowledgeable source, like NOAA, to firm up its numbers.”

  “I guess. But why not act now and fine-tune later?”

  “That’s an excellent question, and maybe there’s a clue hiding in that data. I just don’t know what to make of it yet.”

  8

  A Really Bad Case of Gas

  The sky was blue, the sea was calm, and life was good for Able Seaman Adam Duff. He was halfway through his watch at the helm of the OzGas Uluru, and with the ship’s autopilot engaged, there was little to do except stay alert and keep a sharp lookout. Even that duty was limited due to the sheer size of the vessel. Though the bridge towered high above the sea, the bow of the Uluru was more than one thousand feet ahead of him. Not that he could see it, because it was hidden behind the curved surfaces of five enormous, spherical tanks and the maze of pipes above them that ran most of the length of the ship. Anything that didn’t show up on the ship’s radar had better stay out of the way.

  In any event, it was more interesting to plan his shore time. In two days they’d tie up at the LNG terminal in Joetsu, Japan and discharge close to ten million cubic feet of liquefied natural gas. Joetsu wasn’t a big city, but it handled enough shipping to provide the types of extracurricular activities a sailor on shore leave looked forward to. After eleven days on duty at sea, he was more th
an ready to be entertained.

  A stream of vapor venting off from somewhere ahead caught his eye. That wasn’t unusual. Some of the cargo was always changing from liquid to gas, especially as the day grew warmer. He looked at his instrument display. That was odd; the temperature outside had fallen during his watch. Maybe the ship had sailed into a warmer current. That must be it. That would warm up the tanks more than a change in air temperature.

  There was more gas venting now. But wait a minute – it wasn’t venting from the relief valve on top of any of the tanks; it was coming from somewhere else – somewhere lower, between the first and second LNG tanks.

  “Sir,” he said. “I think something’s wrong.”

  Tom Bevis, second mate and officer of the watch, looked up from his control station. “What’s that?”

  “There’s a lot of gas venting off forward. And it’s not coming from anywhere it should. Take a look.”

  Bevis stood up and looked where the seaman was pointing. Duff was right. Bevis pulled a pair of binoculars out of its wall bracket and tried to figure out where the gas was coming from. But it was too thick now to see anything clearly. He picked up the phone and rang the captain.

  “Sir, Bevis here. Sorry to bother you, but we’ve got a situation I think you need to know about. There’s a lot of gas venting forward of tank two. I can’t tell where it’s coming from, and it doesn’t look like it’s coming from anywhere it should.” He listened and then looked forward again. “I think it is increasing, sir. Yes, sir. I’ll call him right away, sir.”