Chapter 13

'Well, you can bet your boots that them there storms last week didn't do near as much damage to them Archers as it done to us.'

'Aw, Dad, don't be daft. You just didn't follow the instructions they gave us on the radio.'

'I tells you, Eddie, there ain't never no luck, for us Grundys. And that's the truth!'

Lizzie switched off the radio as the well known signature tune started up again. 'That another one of your brainstorms, Dick?' she asked, cattily I thought.

I opened my mouth to reply that it was, actually, but the phone rang in the hall. A hailstorm of footsteps sounded through the house. 'Dad, Dad!' bawled Bobby. 'Phone for you, Dad! Sounds posh, Dad! Daaad!'

I stepped up to the phone, glared at Bobby and tapped my finger on my lip angrily. 'Turner, here,' I said in my smoothest official voice.

'Dick, this is Arthur Summers,' crackled the receiver. 'You've got to get right down to London today. It's urgent.'

I groaned. 'But, Arthur, it's Sunday,' I complained. 'You must know that the roads and trains to London are still blocked from the last storm.'

'Yes, I know all that, Dick,' said Arthur, 'We're sending a helicopter to pick you up.'

'What?' I cried. 'Are you out of your mind, Arthur?'

'Dick, this is absolutely urgent,' said Arthur. 'You've got to come to London, no options. The aircraft's on its way already. It should be reaching you,' there was a brief pause and a hurried conversation in the background, 'In fifteen to twenty minutes. Met says the winds are only 40 to 50 miles per hour in your area at the moment.' Notice; only 40 to 50 miles per hour. That's how easily we got used to the winds. When I was a lad, that would have been a bloody storm. 'Peters says that there's a big field behind your house where it can land.'

That bloody Peters had been a right snoop, all right, or maybe it was the satellites. 'What can I say, Arthur?' I asked.

'Say goodbye to your family, Dick, bring a couple of good suits and be prepared to stay as long as you're needed,' ordered Arthur. 'I'll see you in about two hours.' He hung up without waiting for my reply.

I told Lizzie the news with an apologetic air. It did no good. She packed my bag silently, folding each item carefully and solemnly, then slamming each carefully folded item into the bag. A quarter of an hour later, a bulbous, bright yellow RAF Wessex bounced down on its fat wheels behind our house. Its beacon strobed ice white in the angled tail. My panicked sheep cringed together in the north corner of the dry field, jumping on each other in fear. Bobby was so thrilled by the whole thing that he literally wet himself. Cathy stayed up in her room after gracing me with a curt goodbye. Lizzie, for once, was almost speechless. She clung to me tightly for a minute and then kissed me fiercely. Urgency to leave gripped me suddenly. I ran across the field and clambered into the helicopter. A helmeted crewman pulled me in and efficently strapped me into a seat.

I waved at Lizzie and Bobby through the square door. She put her arm protectively around Bobby and shielded her eyes from the bright sun with her free hand. The crewman pinched his throat microphone and spoke. The engine roar increased suddenly and the craft lurched upwards and swung around. I caught my last glimpse of Lizzie, blowing a kiss, as the crewman rolled the door shut. It was an absolutely terrifying, stomach churning flight south. After about an hour we landed at Brize Norton. The crew and I waited on the windswept tarmac while the helicopter was refuelled. Extensive storm damage was apparent, even on the airfield. We raced straight on into London and, to my surprise, landed on the Horse Guards parade ground just after midday. Even the porters were impressed. They treated me with lavish respect and hurried me into the committee room without their usual delay and mindless chatter.

'Not bad time, Dick,' said Sir Anthony cheerfully. 'Well done.'

'Yeah,' I grunted, dropping my garment carrier behind the door. 'Only problem is that my stomach is still sporting with the sheep back in Wales.'

'We need to get cracking right away, Dick,' said Arthur with unusual directness. 'We've got a presentation on some new information from the Director of the Oceanographic Institute in a few minutes. I believe that this presentation demands our most immediate attention.'

'That sounds serious,' I commented. I wiggled around the chairs and sat on Sir Anthony's right.

'I believe this could be extremely serious,' replied Arthur decisively. 'But we must vet this material very carefully before pushing it on upstairs. We can't afford any more wolf crying. Especially not with what you're about to hear.'

There was a quick rap on the door. A weather-beaten, moustached man, of about Sir Anthony's age, limped briskly into the room. 'Afternoon,' he said.

'Good afternoon, Roger,' replied Sir Anthony. 'I don't believe you know Professor Richard Turner, our Deputy Head Scientist. Roger Hamilton, Director of the Oceanographic Institute.'

I shook Hamilton's proffered hand. 'A pleasure,' I murmured, 'I know your work'.

Hamilton unbuckled his briefcase, pulled out a laptop and connected it to the projector. 'I think I'd better get right down to the point, gentlemen. We received new material from the Americans two days ago and finished processing it last night. We think that the Government should see the results right away.'

He showed a light blue transparency on the projector. It looked like a world bathometric map. 'This is a false colour, sea surface topography map of the earth's oceans. It was made in the early '80s by Seasat, an oceanographical research satellite. Seasat had, for its day, a very accurate radar altimeter. This allowed waves and even the height surface of the earth's oceans to be measured. Until then, ocean topography measurements had never been possible.' He pointed to an area on the map. 'Surprisingly, the height of the surface of the world's oceans was found to vary by as much as 600 feet.'

'I didn't know that,' said Sir Anthony with surprise. 'Are you sure of that?'

Hamilton nodded. 'It's not particularly common knowledge, but it's been verified by other means now.' He showed another slide. 'This is a similar map, made by a later model Seasat, in the early '90s. Even more accurate laser altimetry technology was employed in this satellite. The topographic patterns appear roughly similar. At first glance, that is. Here is a map from the most recent generation equipment, which is an order of magnitude more accurate still.'

He gazed at us. 'One of our research assistants, a remote sensing specialist, recently carried out a complex computer analysis of these three maps. She took into account the differences in altimetry technology, scaling techniques and filtering frequencies used. To make a long story short, she corrected the earlier map and subtracted it from the later ones.' He slid a third film on the projector. 'Basically, the difference shows that there appears to have been a 50 to 100 foot sea level rise over three equatorial mid-ocean abyssal plains. This phenomenon appears to have taken place in just about ten years.'

'So, to what do you attribute this rise, Roger?' demanded Sir Anthony.

'Well, Tony, there's no evidence of sea level fall away from these Bulges, as we call them. On the contrary, there is a general, but all-in-all moderate, coastal increase in mean sea level, as you doubtless know already. This means that the rise cannot be the result of water being pulled away, as it were, from other areas,' replied Hamilton.

'So that means that there must be a lot more water, somehow,' I said. It didn't take a genius to figure that out. 'Do you think it could be the result of ice pack melting?'

'No, we don't think so,' replied Hamilton patiently. 'There obviously must be a considerably greater volume of water overall, but ice melt does not appear to have been sufficient to account for this amount of increase. Certainly not in such a short time, nor is there any way that the water have gone only to these particular tropical localities. Another indication is that there are no signs of general surface salinity decrease which would indicate large-scale dilution by fresh water.'

'So where's all this blasted water coming from then, dammit?' demanded Sir Anthony.

'Well, we're not really sure,' admitted Hamilton. 'We think it could be caused by some kind of temperature or chemically related water volume change at depth. We suppose it could possibly be related to global warming, particularly since the effect seems to be confined to the equatorial regions. After all, in the abyssal plains where depths may reach four miles, as little as one percent increase in water volume could easily result in a sea level rise of over 100 feet. Changes of water volume at great depth also might explain why expansion seems to be taking place only in those particular localities, deep ones. The great depths involved could explain, too, why no one has detected these Bulges during their usual oceanographic survey programmes.'

'I thought water was supposed to be inelastic, Dr Hamilton,' I said inanely. I suddenly realised that I really knew very little about this incredibly common substance, water.

'Well,' he replied patiently, 'Pure water very nearly is inelastic, Professor, but it still expands and contracts with temperature. I don't really think, though, that elasticity has any particular relevance to this change in volume. In any event, sea water is a complex mixture of dissolved gases and minerals. It can exhibit peculiar, almost unpredictable, physical behaviour under certain conditions, especially at great depth, even can form complex gels and aerosols. Frankly, we don't really know as much about sea water as we should. It's quite possible that methane hydrates or hydrates of carbon dioxide could be involved. GOK, god only knows.'

'Theories, smearies, Roger,' bluntly dismissed Sir Anthony. 'What's the bottom line to all this bloody Bulging?' he demanded.

'If the discovery of these Bulges was all I thought there was to it, I wouldn't be up here on a Sunday, Tony,' growled Hamilton. 'I'd be finishing off a classical scientific paper and sloping off down to Nature instead. This could be Nobel Prize stuff, if they gave them for oceanography.'

Hamilton showed another slide. This image was only a complex series of geometrical grids, without colouring. 'This transparency is a hastily processed aggregate of the last several months data from Seasat XXII altimetry,' he said. 'It only shows a spiral swathe of about one quarter of the earth. We persuaded the Americans to release the data to us early and unprocessed so that we could run a check to verify the presence of the Bulges and to see if they were spreading.'

'And?' I asked.

I'm sorry to say that, as far as we can tell, the Bulges do appear to be spreading quite rapidly,' replied Hamilton.

'Oh, Jesus Christ,' I breathed. 'How much?'

'The Bulge which concerns us most immediately is the one originating within the Cape Verde Basin, about 1500 miles west of Dakar. The Cape Verde Bulge is now nearly 500 miles at its widest diameter. It is now approximately 85 feet high. At present, it appears to be spreading by perhaps as much as four or five miles per day.' Hamilton paused. 'This is a rough estimate, but is fairly typical of the speed of water body movements in the oceans, in general.'

'Yes,' prompted Sir Anthony. 'So go on, Roger.'

'Well, we have two scenarios, at present, Tony. The first is that the Bulge is like a mountain, caused by the rapid expansion of a very large, but still relatively localised, body of water. Somewhat like the formation of a giant bubble. Assuming that the epicentre of the Bulge does not rise higher than 100 feet, mean sea level probably will commence rising off the West African coast in somewhat less than two months. It will peak at around 50 feet about a month later.'

'What will that mean to Britain?' I asked nervously.

Hamilton sighed heavily. 'In this scenario, we think that a maximum 10 to 15 foot rise in sea level will occur on the Southern English coast in approximately one and a half years from now.'

'I guess we can just about cope with that,' I said confidently. 'That's about as much as a bad storm at spring tide.' Suddenly remembering Weymouth, I wasn't so sure about coping.

'You haven't heard the second scenario, yet, Professor,' said Hamilton gloomily. 'In this one, the Bulge is a sort of spreading plateau, not a localised bubble,' said Hamilton. 'In this case, the plateau is the result of imperfect thermal conductivity, or whatever the causative agent may be, of oceanic water volume expanding as an entire body. In other words, the volume of the entire ocean is increasing, although at an irregular rate. In this case, Bulge height is not likely to exceed its present 85 feet, but sea level height at the margins is primarily a function of depth. Therefore, Bulge margin height does not diminish appreciably until shallow water is reached.'

'Well, Roger,' urged Sir Anthony, 'What the hell is that supposed to mean to us?'

'Well, spreading rates are similar to the plateau scenario, Tony, except that West Africa is hit by a very rapid and permanent, 75 foot rise in about two months. Practically speaking, there will be a wall of water smacking right into that coast, like a tsunami. There is almost certain to be a massive loss of life in the low lying regions of West Africa.'

'And us?' I asked hollowly.

'Basically, we calculate that the European continental shelf will be hit by a very rapid 40 to 60 foot sea level rise in about one year and a few months,' Hamilton said flatly. 'The continental shelf and our irregular coastline will make it difficult, however, to predict the exact magnitude of sea level changes to Britain.'

'What's your worst guess, then?' I demanded.

'Our very worst guess is that a gigantic swell will pile up in the confines of the English Channel and the Irish Sea,' replied Hamilton grimly. 'That could result in initial surges considerably in excess of 100 feet above present mean sea level.'

'Holy shit,' I breathed. Beads of sweat stood out on Arthur's forehead. Sir Anthony looked as if he was almost dozing.

'That's not all, either,' added Hamilton. 'We expect a pretty heavy weather front to accompany the wall of water, in any event. I guess the weather boys should be able to tell you more about that later.' He paused and looked at us angrily, as though this was somehow our fault.

'Will the water go back?' asked Arthur.

'The waters should recede back to the new sea level after a few weeks, of course,' replied Hamilton.

'And what would that new sea level most likely be, Roger?' asked Sir Anthony.

'Well, that's hard to say exactly,' replied Hamilton. 'It really depends on the nature of the volume changes. I would guess it might be perhaps as much as 50 feet higher than present, maybe more, maybe less.'

'And what about this weather business?' I asked. I kept on thinking about Lizzie and the wind.

'It's impossible to say when, if ever, the weather will return to normal, whatever that might mean,' grunted Hamilton.

'Which of these two Bulge scenarios, mountain or plateau, do you think is the more likely?' asked Arthur in a strangled voice.

'Unfortunately, the most recent data seem to favour the second scenario. Certainly, a great deal more study is indicated and chop-chop, too.' Hamilton switched off the projector light and sat down. His right leg poked out stiffly. 'So that's what I have to say, gentlemen,' he finished.

'Do you have any other proof of this theory than these satellite pictures?' rumbled Sir Anthony.

'Well, Tony, the proof of this little pudding is that we expect St Vincent and the Cape Verde Islands to virtually cease to exist some time within the next,' Hamilton glanced at his wristwatch, 'Eighteen to twenty days, at the present rate of spreading.' His right eye fluttered rapidly. There was silence in the room except for the whirring projector fan and the throbbing wind outside.

And that, gentle reader, is how we heard about the end of our world. Now you probably are going to think that we were totally out of our skulls when I tell you this, but do you know, we argued for two whole days before deciding to take even that much information to the Minister. We were terrified of giving the politicos information that turned out to be wrong or exaggerated.

In the end, we decided that it would be considerably more embarrassing to have the Cape Verde Islands disappear without us having told the Government anything about it beforehand, than for us to warn them and for it not to happen, if you see what I mean. We decided, though, to hold back the information about the Bulge hitting Britain until Cape Verde happened, if it did. A similar logic must have bedeviled the Minister, although he didn't know about Britain, because he sat on the information for ten days before deciding to tell the Prime Minister. Then, of course, absolutely all hell broke loose.