The Rising   Journeys in the Wake of Global Warming

Discourse

Essays

THE SCIENCE IN OUR FICTION

The creation of our novel began as a visceral reaction to the historic three-day collapse of the main Larsen B Ice Shelf in Antarctica March 5-7, 2002. See the satellite photos. We set about to imagine the socio-political effects of a sudden and pervasive catastrophe on today’s America. Much is written about the probability or improbability of triggering events: an asteroid strike, a pandemic of treatment-resistant disease or unstoppable mutant creatures, a regional nuclear war, abrupt cessation of the thermohaline current in the North Atlantic. The Rising was not designed to delve into the science of the catastrophe we imagined, but rather to explore what could happen to individuals as catastrophic events cascade through their lives. Our novel does not join the debate over whether human activities are causing or accelerating natural climate cycles (although the authors are personally convinced humanity is increasingly responsible for global warming).

There is fiction in our science, but each of the four catastrophic natural events is based on mainstream scientific research. A primary element of fiction is time frame compression. Although each event is plausible on its own, the probability is low that any would happen as suddenly as in the book, and even lower that all four would occur within the few weeks our dramatization required. Links to Web pages that outline or lead to sources of the science are listed under “Links.”

The sequence of natural disaster in the novel is: (1) Antarctic ice shelves collapse—the Ross Ice Shelf first, then the Ronne ten days later; (2) volcanos erupt landward of the Ronne grounding line; (3) a Siberian-style magma plume upwells from deep in Earth’s crust on the Waddell Sea side of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melting about 20% of it; and (4) a volcanic eruption destroys Mt. Jackson on the Antarctic Peninsula propagating tsunamis northward in the Atlantic.

(1) The catastrophic collapse of the Ross Ice Shelf and Ronne Ice Shelf is probable. Woods Hole and Carol Pudsey (chief scientist for the British Antarctic Expedition, whom we interviewed by telephone) foresee this within one to three decades.

(2) The eruption of volcanos triggered by release of the weight of ice is well documented on Iceland and is highly plausible around the edges of a collapsed Ronne Ice Shelf, which would relieve massive pressure beginning at the grounding line of the glacial shelf.

(3) We needed volcanos to melt enough ice quickly enough to have the suddenness of disaster necessary to our plot. There are volcanos in Antarctica. To raise sea level three feet (see Footnote 1 below) we needed to melt a one-mile thick ice sheet measuring 350 miles by 300 miles. This required a Very Deep Magma Plume, such as the Siberian upwelling of c. 260 million years ago—plausible, although less likely under Antarctica than Hawaii, Yellowstone or Iceland.

(4) Catastrophic flank collapses of seaside volcanos every 10,000 years or so (Hawaii, Canary Islands) are well documented, with tsunami calculated at 70 to 400 feet high hitting American shorelines. We fictionalized the volcanic nature of Mt. Jackson for dramatic purposes. It is plausible that catastrophic ice collapses around the Waddell Sea would propagate tsunami northward. However, the bulge of South America would protect the East Coast of North America relatively well, even from a Mt. Jackson-sized wave. An early plot outline had a tsunami hitting the Canaries, triggering a flank collapse at Cumbre Viejo which then propagated a second tsunami toward the U.S. But explaining that much science was poison to pace in the novel. So Mt. Jackson had to suffice. The novel takes no position on how high the lead tsunami was when it left Antarctica. If it were massive enough, it could have ricocheted off Europe. One tsunami web site calculated that if a 10-km wide asteroid were to strike the deep North Atlantic, the energy could create a tsunami several miles high!

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Footnote 1:

The exact genesis of the novel was the Astronomy Picture of the Day for May 27, 2002 (a NASA web site). See the APOD photo. That photo is on the back cover of the book. The final sentence on the NASA web site’s “explanation” says: “Scientists are watching the much larger Ross Ice Shelf, which, if it collapses, could cause global sea levels to rise five meters.” A few hours after I read this, my wife and I drove across the San Francisco Bay Bridge toll plaza and I visualized water rising 15 feet. The novel was born. Subsequent research revealed, however, that if the Ross Ice Shelf collapsed like Larsen B, it would still take about a century for the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet to melt into the sea and cause a five meter sea level rise. But our writing was too far advanced to back away from a sudden disaster scenario. That’s when we added volcanos and the deep crust magma plume so we could get sea level up at least three feet within a few weeks. The Mt. Jackson tsunami was a natural afterthought.

Chapter Notes

Coming soon!