Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [111]
“This is a fine specimen of a pingo,” the areologist said with a proprietary air. “The ice masses are relatively pure compared to the permafrost matrix, and they act in the matrix the same way rocks do— when the permafrost refreezes at night or in winter, it expands, and anything hard stuck in this expansion gets pushed upward toward the surface. There’s a lot of pingos in Terran tundra, but none as big as this one.” She led the group up the shattered concrete of what had been a flat street, and they stared out from an earthen crater rim, onto a mound of dirty white ice. “We’ve lanced it like a boil, and are melting it and piping it into the canals.”
“Out in the country one of these coming up would be like an oasis,” Sax remarked to Jessica. “It would melt in the summer, and hydrate the ground around it. We ought to develop a community of seeds and spores and rhizomes that we could scatter on any sites like this out in the country.”
“True,” Jessica said. “Although, to be realistic, the permafrost country is mostly going to end up under the Vastitas sea anyway.”
“Hmm.”
The truth was Sax had temporarily forgotten the drilling and mining in Vastitas. When they had returned to the conference center, he deliberately looked for a talk describing an aspect of that work. There was one at four: “Recent Advances in North Polar Lens Permafrost Pumping Procedures.”
He watched the speaker’s video show impassively. The lens of ice that extended underground from the northern polar cap was like the submerged part of an iceberg, containing some ten times as much water as the visible cap. The Vastitas permafrost contained even more. But getting that water to the surface . . . like the retrieval of nitrogen from Titan’s atmosphere, it was a project so massive that Sax had never even considered it in the early years; it simply hadn’t been possible then. All these big projects— the soletta, the nitrogen from Titan, the northern ocean drilling, the frequent arrival of ice asteroids— were on a scale that Sax found he was having trouble adjusting to. They were thinking big these days, the transnationals. Certainly the new abilities in design and in materials science, and the emergence of fully self-replicating factories, were what made the projects technically feasible; but the initial financial investments were still huge.
As for the technical capabilities involved, he found himself adjusting to the idea of them fairly rapidly. It was an extension of what they had done in the old days: solve some initial problems in materials, design, and homeostatic control, and one’s powers grew very considerable indeed. One might say that their reach no longer exceeded their grasp. Which, given the directions their reach sometimes took, was a frightening thought.
In any case, some fifty drilling platforms were now located in the northern Sixties, boring wells and inserting permafrost melting devices at their bottoms that ranged from heated collection galleries to nuclear explosives. The new meltwater was then being pumped up and distributed over the dunes of Vastitas Borealis, where it froze again. Eventually this ice sheet would melt, partly under its own weight, and they would have an ocean in the shape of a ring around the northern Sixties and Seventies, no doubt a very good thermal sink, as all oceans were, although while it remained an ice sea the increase in albedo would probably make it a net heat loss to the global system. Yet another example of their operations cutting against each other. As was the location of Burroughs itself,