Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [85]
Charlie read on, feeling somewhat amazed that he was learning this in the back pages of the Post. How fast could this happen? The researchers didn’t appear to know. As the sheet broke away, they said, seawater was lifting the edges of the ice still resting on the bottom, deeper and deeper at every tide, tugging with every current, and thus beginning to tear the sheet apart in big vertical cracks, and launch it out to sea.
Charlie checked this on the web, and watched one trio of researchers explain on camera that it could become an accelerating process, their words likewise accelerating a bit, as if to illustrate how it would go. Modeling inconclusive because the sea bottom under the grounded ice irregular, they said, with active volcanoes under it, so who knew? But it very well might happen fast.
Charlie heard in their voices the kind of repressed delirium of scientific excitement that he had heard once or twice when listening to Anna talk about some extraordinary thing in statistics that he had not even been able to understand. This, however, he understood. They were saying that the possibility was very real that the whole mass of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would break apart and float away, each giant piece of it then sinking more deeply into the water, thus displacing more water than it had when grounded in place—so much more that sea level worldwide could rise by an eventual total of about seven meters. “This could happen fast,” one glaciologist emphasized, “and I’m not talking geology fast here, I’m talking tide fast. A matter of several years in some simulations.” The hard thing to pinpoint was whether it would start to accelerate or not. It depended on variables programmed into the models—on they went, the usual kind of scientist talk.
And yet the Post had it at the back of the international section! People were talking about it the same way they did any other disaster. There did not seem to be any way to register a distinction in response between one coming catastrophe and another. They were all bad. If it happened it happened. That seemed to be the way people were processing it. Of course the Khembalis would have to be extremely concerned. The whole League of Drowning Nations, for that matter. Meaning everyone. Charlie had done enough research on the tidal power stuff, and other coastal issues, to give him a sharpened sense that this was serious, and perhaps the tipping point into something worse. All of a sudden it coalesced into a clear vision standing before him, and what he saw frightened him. Twenty percent of humanity lived on the coast. He felt like he had one time driving in winter when he had taken a turn too fast and hit an icy patch he hadn’t seen, and the car had detached and he found himself flying forward, free of friction or even gravity, as if sideslipping in reality itself.
But it was time to go downtown. He was going to take Joe with him to the office. He pulled himself together, got out the stroller so they would spare each other their body heat. Life had to go on; what else could he do?
Out they ventured into the steambath of the capital. It really didn’t feel that much different than the ordinary summer day. As if the sensation of heat hit an upper limit where it just blurred out. Joe was seatbelted into his stroller like a NASCAR driver, so that he would not launch himself out at inopportune moments. Naturally he did not like this and he objected to the stroller because of it, but Charlie had decorated its front bar as an airplane cockpit dashboard, which placated Joe enough that he did not persist in his howls or attempts to escape. “Resistance is futile!”
They took the elevators in the Metro stations and came up on the Mall, to stroll over to Phil’s office in the old carpenters’ union. A bad idea, as crossing the Mall was like being blanched in boiling air. Charlie, as