Polar Shift

Austin leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. 'I've learned that nothing is ordinary when it comes to the ocean.'

'I've hesitated up to now because I didn't want to be labeled a humbug. It took years for the scientific community to accept freak waves as fact. My colleagues would rip me to shreds if they knew what I was thinking.'

'We couldn't let that happen,' Austin said reassuringly. 'I'll respect your confidence.'

The professor nodded. 'When the empirical evidence of these waves became too strong to deny, the European Union launched two high-resolution-image satellites. The project was called Max Wave. The goal was to see if these waves existed, and examine how they might influence ship and offshore platform design. The European Space Agency satellites would produce 'imagettes,' covering an area just ten by five kilometers. Over a three-week period, the satellites identified more than ten freak waves all higher than eighty-two feet.'

Adler went over and sat in front of the computer. He tapped the keyboard until an image of the globe appeared on the screen. The Atlantic Ocean was speckled with annotated wave symbols. 'I'm using the census data from Wave Atlas. Each symbol denotes the location of a giant wave, its height and the date it was formed. As you can see, there has been an increase in wave activities over the last thirteen months. And in the size of these monsters as well.'

Austin pulled up a chair next to the professor. He scanned the wavy symbols. Each symbol was annotated with the height and date of the event. The waves were randomly scattered around the world, except for several clusters.

'Do you notice anything unusual?'

'These four circular patterns are each spaced the same distance apart in the Atlantic, including the area we're in now. Two in the North Atlantic. Two in the South. What about the Pacific?'

'I'm glad you asked me that.' He manipulated the globe until the Pacific Ocean came into view.

Austin whistled. 'Four similar clusters. Strange.'

'That's what struck me as odd too.' A faint smile crossed his lips. 'I've measured the clusters and found that they are exactly equidistant in each ocean.'

'What are you saying, Professor?'

'That there appears to be a conscious plan at work here. These waves are the work either of man or God.'

Austin pondered the implications of the professor's statement. 'There is a third possibility,' he said after a moment. 'Man acting as God.'

Arching a bushy eyebrow, Adler said, 'That's out of the question, of course.'

Austin smiled. 'Not necessarily. Mankind has a history of trying to control the elements.'

'Controlling the sea is another matter.'

'I agree, although there have been crude but effective attempts. Dikes and storm barriers go back hundreds of years.'

'I was a consultant on the Venice tidal gate project, so I know what you mean. Stopping the ocean involves a relatively simple concept. It's the engineering that becomes the challenge. The creation of giant waves would be far more difficult.'

'But not impossible,' Austin said.

'No, not impossible.'

'Have you given any thought to means? Something like huge underwater explosions?'

'Highly unlikely,' Adler said with a shake of his head. 'You'd need an explosion of a nuclear level, and it would be detected. Any other ideas?'

'Not offhand,' Austin said. 'But it's definitely something that NUMA should investigate.'

'You have no idea how happy I am to hear you say that,' Adler said with relief. 'I thought I was going crazy.'

A thought occurred to Austin. 'Joe wondered if the Trouts' work might shed some light on this mystery,' he said.

'Sure, I remember. You mentioned that a couple of your NUMA colleagues are working on another research project in this area.'

Austin nodded. 'South of our position. They're with a group of scientists on the NOAA ship Benjamin Franklin, looking into the biological implications of the giant eddies in the Atlantic Ocean.'

'As I said, I wouldn't rule anything out. It's certainly worth looking into.'

'We can talk to them about their findings when we get back to port.'

'Why wait?' Adler said.

Adler's fingers played over the keys and a Web site popped up on the screen, followed by a satellite image showing the mid-Atlantic coast. 'The ocean satellite taking this picture can pick up an object as small as a sardine.'

'Amazing,' Austin said, leaning close to the screen.

Adler clicked the computer mouse. 'Now we're seeing ocean water temperature. That wavy band of reddish brown is the Gulf Stream. The blue area is cold water, and those circular blobs in tan are warm water eddies. I'll zoom in on our ship.'

He worked the computer mouse so that one of the tan-colored swirls filled the screen. The outlines of two vessels were now visible near the whorl.

'That blip is the Throckmorton. The other one must be your NOAA ship. Wow! This stuff still amazes me.'

Austin leaned over Adler's shoulder. 'What's that smaller circle in the southeast quadrant?'

Adler enlarged the image. 'It's a separate eddy. Acting real funny. The numbers in the little boxes show water movement speed and level. The level within the swirl seems to be dropping while the water is moving at increasing speed.' Adler's eyes were glued to the screen. The swirl, now almost a perfect circle, continued to grow. 'Migod,' he said.

'What's the problem?'

The professor tapped the screen. 'We seem to be looking at the birth of a gigantic whirlpool.'

7

Gamay Morgan-Trout carefully lowered the Van Dorn sampler over the port rail of the NOAA survey ship and watched the nine-liter plastic cylinder sink beneath the foam-flecked waves. She played out the thin connecting cable as the sampler plunged hundreds of feet to the ocean bottom.

After the bottle filled with water and automatically sealed, she began to winch it back on board with the help of her husband. Paul Trout hauled the dripping bottle the last few feet from the water, detached the sampler from the cable and held it to the light, as if he were testing the color of a fine glass of wine.

Trout had a twinkle in his hazel eyes. 'This is absurd,' he said.

'What's absurd?'

'Consider what we're doing.'

Still puzzled, Gamay said, 'Okay, we've just tossed a fancy bottle over the side and hauled it up filled with seawater.'

'Thank you for making my point. Look around at this ship. The Benjamin Franklin is loaded with cutting-edge research gear. We've got stuff like specialized echo sounders, multibeam and side-scan sonar and the latest in computer hardware and software. But we're no different from the ancient mariners who smeared wax on their sounding lead to check out the composition of the ocean bottom.'

Gamay smiled. 'And now we're about to collect plankton using an old-fashioned fisherman's net. I draw the line when it comes to transport. No rowboat. How's the Zodiac coming?'

'Ready to go,' Trout said. He read the surface of the sea with an experienced eye. 'Wind's freshening. Could get choppy. We'll have to stay sharp.' He pronounced it 'shaap,' betraying his New England roots.