Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [82]
Schofield smiled reassuringly at her. ‘That’s good enough for me, Miss Sinclair. Is it okay if I call you Abby?’
She nodded.
Schofield said, ‘All right. Abby, I have two problems, and I’m hoping that you can help me with both of them. I need to get in contact with my superiors at McMurdo as soon as possible. I need to tell them what’s happened here so that they can send in the cavalry, if they haven’t done so already. Now, we’ve been trying to raise McMurdo on our portable radio, but we can’t get through. Question One: does the radio system here work?’
Abby smiled weakly. ‘It was working. I mean, before all this started. But then the solar flare kicked in and disrupted all our transmissions. In the end, though, that didn’t matter because our antenna went down in the storm and we never got a chance to fix it.’
‘That’s okay,’ Schofield said. ‘We can fix that.’
Something else that she had said, however, troubled him. Schofield had been told about the ‘solar flare’ phenomenon on his way to Wilkes, but he didn’t know exactly what it was. All he knew was that it disrupted the electromagnetic spectrum, and in doing so, prevented any sort of radio communication.
‘Tell me about solar flares,’ he said to Abby.
‘There isn’t really much to tell,’ Abby replied. ‘We don’t really know that much about them. “Solar flare” is actually the term used to describe a brief, high temperature explosion on the surface of the sun, what most people would call a sunspot. When a sunspot occurs, it emits a huge amount of ultraviolet radiation. A huge amount. Like ordinary heat from the sun, this radiation travels through space towards the earth. When it gets here, it contaminates our ionosphere, turning it into a thick blanket of electromagnetic may-hem. Satellites become useless because radio signals from the earth can’t penetrate the contaminated ionosphere. Similarly, signals coming from satellites down to the earth can’t get through the ionosphere either. Radio communication becomes impossible.’
Abby suddenly looked about herself. Her eyes fell on one of the computer screens next to her. ‘Actually. We have some weather-monitoring gear in here. If you’ll just give me a minute, I might be able to show you what I mean.’
‘Sure,’ Schofield said as Abby switched on the computer next to her.
The computer hummed to life. Once it was up and running, Abby clicked through various screens until she came to the one she wanted. It was a satellite map of south-eastern Antarctica, overlaid with multi-coloured patches. A barometric weather map. Like the ones on the evening news.
‘This is a snapshot of the eastern Antarctic weather system for –’ Abby looked at the date in the corner of the screen ‘– two days ago.’ She looked around at Schofield. ‘It was probably one of the last ones we got before the solar flare moved in and cut us off from the weather satellite.’
She clicked her mouse. Another screen came up. ‘Oh, wait, here’s another one. There it is,’ Abby said.
It filled half the screen.
An enormous yellow-white blob of atmospheric disturbance. It filled the entire left-hand side of the map, smothering nearly half of the pictured Antarctic coastline. In real terms, Schofield thought, the solar flare must have been absolutely enormous.
‘And that is your solar flare, Lieutenant,’ Abby said. She turned to look at Schofield. ‘It must have moved eastward after this shot was taken and covered us, too.’
Schofield stared at the yellow-white blob superimposed on the Antarctic coastline. There were slight discolourations in it, red and orange patches, even some black ones.
Abby said, ‘Since they usually explode in one section of the sun’s surface, solar flares usually only affect defined areas. One station might have a total radio blackout while another, two hundred miles away, will have all of its systems working just fine.’
Schofield stared at the screen. ‘How long do they last?’
Abby shrugged. ‘A day. Sometimes two. However long it