Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [77]
‘Prove what?’
Sarah took a deep breath. ‘The theory goes that once, a long time ago, there was civilised life on earth.’
She paused, not for effect, but rather to wait for Schofield’s reaction.
At first, Schofield didn’t say anything, he just thought about it for a moment. Then he looked at Sarah. ‘Go on.’
‘I’m talking about a long time ago,’ Sarah said, gaining momentum. ‘I’m talking before the dinosaurs. I’m talking four hundred million years ago. Now, when you think about it . . . when you think about it in terms of human evolution, it’s really very possible.
‘Human life as we know it has been on earth for less than a million years, right. Historically speaking, that’s not a long time. If the history of the earth were the twenty-four hours in a day, then the period of modern human presence would amount to about three seconds. What we would call civilised human life – human life in its homo sapien form – has been here for an even shorter period of time, not even twenty thousand years. That’s less than a second on the world’s time clock.’
Schofield watched Sarah Hensleigh closely as she spoke. She was excited, speaking quickly. She was in her element.
‘What palaeontologists usually say,’ she said, ‘is that a whole matrix of factors contributed to the rise of the mammals, and hence the rise of human life on earth. The right distance from the sun, the right temperature, the right atmosphere, the right oxygen levels in the atmosphere, and, of course, the extinction of the dinosaurs. We all know about the Alvarez theory, how an asteroid slammed into the earth and killed all the dinosaurs and how the mammals rose out of the darkness and took their place as the rulers of the world. What if I was to tell you that there is evidence that there were at least four other such asteroid impacts on this planet in the last 700 million years.’
‘Asteroid impacts,’ Schofield said.
‘Yes. Sir Edmund Halley once suggested that the entire Caspian Sea was created by an asteroid collision hundreds of millions of years ago. Alexander Bickerton, the famous New Zealand physicist who taught Rutherford, hypothesised that the sea bed of the entire south Atlantic Ocean – between South Africa and South America – was one great big bowl-shaped crater, caused by a massive asteroid impact over three hundred million years ago.
‘Now, if we assume – as we so readily do in the case of the dinosaurs – that every time one of these cataclysmic asteroids hit the earth, a civilisation died, we can only ask, what other kinds of civilisations, like that of the dinosaurs, have also been destroyed? What several academics have suggested in recent years – Joseph Sorenson from Stanford is the most well known – is that one of these civilisations may have been human.’
Schofield looked at the other Marines on the deck around him. They were all listening to Sarah intensely, rapt in her story.
Sarah went on. ‘You see, on average, the earth tilts on its vertical axis half a degree every 22,000 years. What Sorenson postulated was that about four hundred million years ago, the earth was tilted at an angle not unlike the angle it’s tilted on today. It was also no further from the sun than it is now, so it had similar mean temperatures. Ice core samples, like the ones we get from this station, have shown that the air was a mix of oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen, in quantities very similar to that of our own atmosphere today. Don’t you see it? The matrix was the same then as it is now.’
Schofield was slowly beginning to believe what Sarah was saying.
Sarah said, ‘That cavern down there is fifteen hundred feet below sea level, that’s two-and-a-half thousand feet below the average land level of Antarctica. The ice down there is easily four hundred million years old. If it’s upthrusted ice from deeper down – ice that was raised by an earthquake or something – then it could be a lot, lot older.
‘I think that whatever is down there is something that was frozen a long time ago. A long time ago. It could be