Gold in the Keys by Matthew Rief

Author:Matthew Rief [Rief, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-12-28T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

NINE

After a little under an hour, a small cluster of bubbles rose up out of the water near the dive buoy just behind the aft end of the boat. A few minutes later, all five broke the surface. I stepped onto the swim platform in my bare feet, grabbed their equipment and hauled it up onto the boat. Jack slid his mask down to rest around his neck, revealing a big smile on his face.

“The reef looks beautiful today, bro,” he said.

I helped them one by one as they handed me their fins and climbed up the aft ladder.

“Did you get what you needed?” I asked Sam as she climbed up and sat on the transom. I supported her BCD as she unclipped it, then slid it from her back and set it beside the others.

“Won’t know the answer to that until later,” she said. “When we bring everything up on the computer and analyze it. But it looked promising.”

They all unzipped their wet suits and pulled them off. I grabbed a few towels from a nearby storage space and handed one to each of them. Sam was wearing a bikini under her wet suit, and though it wasn’t one of those flashy, dental floss types, I couldn’t help from checking her out nonetheless. After drying off and setting all of the gear aside, we sat in the cockpit for drinks and a light snack of fresh fruit and chips Jack had packed in the cooler. After a few discussions about the dive, I asked them what it was they were trying to study down there in the Keys.

“We’re investigating seismic abnormalities on the seafloor,” Sam said enthusiastically. She was in a much better mood than she’d been in when she’d arrived at the marina. I guessed diving in the clear Caribbean water and enjoying the sea life and reefs was a good way to turn your mood around.

“You mean like earthquakes?” I asked. “I didn’t know there were any down here.”

Sam nodded. “Earthquakes occur everywhere on earth. Some are just much more noticeable than others.” She motioned to Tony, who was hunched over his laptop. “Can you bring up the GPS plots, Tony?”

He punched in a few keys, then turned the screen of the laptop so Jack and I could see it. Sam walked over to us and pointed to various points on the screen that appeared to display a map of the Lower Keys.

“This cluster here,” she said, pointing to a portion of the map filled with light green dots of varying sizes, “this is where we are now. Each of these green marks represents seismic activity of various magnitudes. As you can see, there are many incidents in the Keys, especially at our current location and at the other two locations we’ve chosen to study. When they group together like this in other places in the world, usually unique geological formations are the direct result.”

I listened to her with interest as she explained in more detail how

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