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“No oil,” Henley said. “Only a few small natural gas deposits on the Chinese side.”
“What about water?” Rudi asked.
“No water either, but they did find a complex series of vertical fractures running deep into the crust, well beyond the range of the survey.”
“Vertical fractures?”
“Of a type I’ve never seen before,” Henley admitted. “Nothing in the geology database matches them. It’s like the survey found a new type of rock. Interesting in its own right but not an ocean of freshwater.”
“That made us look even deeper,” Priya said. “And it got me thinking about ways to study what was down there without needing to send an ROV to the bottom. We settled on looking for Kenzo’s Z-waves. And we found them. Apparently, some of the more advanced seismic monitoring stations are equipped to detect them, but the computer programs they run on have been filtering the data out.”
“Why?”
“Because the pattern they produce is identical to the signal generated by a deep-earth mining system using high-intensity sound waves.”
“Mining?”
Priya nodded.
“So that’s what the Chinese have been doing down there.”
“So it appears,” Priya said. “But I’m afraid that’s not the most interesting or stunning news. Once we got ahold of the raw, unfiltered data and ran it through a program that Robert designed, we were able to determine the depth and orientation of the Z-waves. What we found was incredible. The Z-waves are propagating vertically, down into the crust and back up.”
“How deep do they go?” Rudi asked.
Henley answered. “Through the crust and the upper mantle, into an area known as the transition zone. At least two hundred two hundred miles below the surface. At the bottom of the transition zone, the Z-waves are reflected back off the denser rock and bounced back up to the surface, creating a harmonic vibration on the way in and the way out. And that tremor is wreaking havoc on a particular type of mineral within the transition zone.”
“What kind of mineral?”
“Ever heard of ringwoodite?”
“Ring-wood-ite?” Rudi shook his head. “No.”
“It’s a crystalline mineral similar to olivine that forms only under intense pressure. It’s found deep in the transition zone beneath the upper mantle. In 2014, geologists studying a diamond that had been brought to the surface by a volcanic eruption discovered a sample of ringwoodite trapped within it. To their surprise, the strange mineral was not alone; it was concealing a special form of water.”
Priya finished for him. “This led to another study. One to determine how much ringwoodite was
present in the mantle and how much of that contained water. The teams that worked on it used seismic activity as their ultrasound generators and measured the results over a period of months. They discovered that the entire transition zone, one hundred and fifty miles thick, is permeated with ringwoodite and most of that is trapping water. It’s normally held there under the intense pressure, capped by the rock layers above. Something like carbonated water in a soda bottle. But the Chinese mining effort has fractured the rock all the way down to the transition zone, breaking the cap and releasing the pressure.”
“And thus releasing the water,” Rudi said, grasping the rest of the argument. “Which is forcing its way up through the crust under all that pressure. That would explain the field of geysers we’ve seen. And it might give us a clue how to stop it or how bad it’s going to get. I’m not sure why you’re so glum, I don’t consider this bad news at all.”
“Perhaps you should,” Henley said. “This isn’t an oil well that can be capped or even an underground lake that will spew forth for a while and then dry up. The transition zone contains a vast amount of water. An almost unfathomable amount—to use a nautical term.”
“I need numbers,” Rudi said. “Just how much water are we talking about?”
“Three or four times the amount in all the world’s oceans, rivers, lakes and ice caps combined. If it all came to the surface, the landmass of the Earth would be completely submerged. This would be a water-covered planet, a shimmering blue ball without a single island. Even the tip of Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth, would be submerged beneath twelve thousand feet of water.”
Rudi didn’t react to the statement offhand. He knew Henley was given to predictions of destruction—all part of his Hamlet-like nature. But the man was a first-rate scientist. He didn’t twist the numbers, he just tended to focus on the worst possible outcome.
Priya, on the other hand, was the eternal optimist. It was in her nature to believe things were never as bad as they looked and that nothing couldn’t be overcome. Rudi turned her way. “How likely is that to happen?”
“Highly unlikely,” Priya said with a glance toward Henley. “But if just five percent of the water trapped inside the transition layer is forced to the surface . . . sea levels will rise by two thousand feet.”
“Two thousand feet?” Rudi said.
Priya nodded.
“And how likely is a five percent discharge from this layer of rock?”
