The Omega Principle by Paul Greenberg

Author:Paul Greenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

Hi sweetie, this is Daddy: over

Merry Christmas, Daddy: over

Merry Christmas to you too: over

I love you, Daddy: over

I love you too, sweetheart: over

Allison had dreamed of joining her father on the ice someday, saying when people had asked about her father’s whereabouts during those lonely Christmases of the 1990s that “Daddy was busy at the bottom of the world.” Now on this particular trip, at twenty-eight, Allison was finally able to come down to the bottom with him. She had just finished a PhD at Columbia University analyzing diatoms in ocean sediment for evidence of climate change. On the fourth day of the voyage, the three of us were thrown together into a Zodiac, and we skimmed along the edge of a glacier and talked about the geologic cycles that were now affecting krill and indeed all of planetary life.

Around us were astounding shapes of ice, bearing otherworldly shades of blue that seemed like hallucinations. It was as if some creative giant, a manically productive sculptor, was constantly whittling out divinely inspired creations, holding them briefly in a palm, and then tossing them over the shoulder to begin working on another dozen masterpieces. Some of these masterpieces were huge. In Antarctica, one is always having to adjust for scale. Ahead was a wall of ice that seemed at first like the buildings in my neighborhood in Manhattan’s financial district. But when I took into account our distance from the ice wall I realized the scape before me was as big as the entire territory of greater New York City, all of it apparently stopped in time like a portrait. But, Bob explained, the appearance of motionlessness was an illusion.

“You can see up there, it looks just like a river,” he said. “If you had a super-speeded-up camera you would see that it has rapids and slow bits, even eddies of ice spinning around. But we don’t, so maybe that’s why some people don’t believe what we’re saying.” To the west of us, the ice shelves that surround this part of Antarctica are beginning to give way. They currently act like a cork, keeping the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in place. With the shelf ice now melting and calving into the sea, the West Antarctic is starting to move. Its eventual collapse is now considered inevitable. When it falls into the water, seas all over the world will rise about 10 feet. Should the much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet eventually go, Jacobel says, the rise will be more than 150 feet.

That the observed changes in west Antarctica would be occurring so fast seemed to strike Bob in a strange way, as if his very past were being erased before his eyes. He had been coming down to the Antarctic on and off for over three decades. His career had overlapped with the step-by-step discoveries that led us to realize humans are playing an active role in changing the earth. Some of those trips were to do geophysical scouting, looking for

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