"Baroque Cycle 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

“I’m sure.”


Anna thought it over while she ate. It was good to know that they hadn’t just rented the first office they found vacant. Nevertheless, their effort in Washington looked to her to be underpowered at this point. “You should meet my husband,” she said. “He works for a senator, one who is up on all these things, a very helpful guy, the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee.”


“Ah—Senator Chase?”


“Yes. You know about him?”


“He has visited Khembalung.”


“Has he? Well, I’m not surprised, he’s been every— He’s been a lot of places. Anyway, my husband Charlie works for him as an environmental policy advisor. It would be good for you to talk to Charlie and get his perspective on your situation. He’ll be full of suggestions for things you could do.”


“That would be an honor.”


“I don’t know if I’d go that far. But useful.”


“Useful, yes. Perhaps we could have you to dinner at our residence.”


“Thank you, that would be nice. But we have two small boys and we’ve lost all our baby-sitters, so to tell the truth it would be easier if you and some of your colleagues came to our place. In fact I’ve already talked to Charlie about this, and he’s looking forward to meeting you. We live in Bethesda, just across the border from the District. It’s not far.”


“Red Line.”


“Yes, very good. Red Line, Bethesda stop. I can give you directions from there.”


She got out her calendar, checked the coming weeks. Very full, as always. “How about a week from Friday? On a Friday we’ll be able to relax a little.”


“Thank you,” Drepung said, ducking his head. He and Rudra Cakrin had an exchange in Tibetan. “That would be very kind. And on the full moon too.”


“Is it? I’m afraid I don’t keep track.”


“We do. The tides, you see.”







III
Intellectual Merit




 






W


ater flows through the oceans in steady recycling patterns, determined by the Coriolis force and the particular positions of the continents in our time. Surface currents can move in the opposite direction to bottom currents below them, and often do, forming systems like giant conveyor belts of water. The largest one is already famous, at least in part: the Gulf Stream is a segment of a warm surface current that flows north up the entire length of the Atlantic, all the way to Norway and Greenland. There the water cools and sinks, and begins a long journey south on the Atlantic Ocean floor, to the Cape of Good Hope and then east toward Australia, and even into the Pacific, where the water upwells and rejoins the surface flow, west to the Atlantic for the long haul north again. The round trip for any given water molecule takes about a thousand years.


Cooling salty water sinks more easily than cooling fresh water. Trade winds sweep clouds generated in the Gulf of Mexico west over Central America to dump their rain in the Pacific, leaving the remaining water in the Atlantic that much saltier. So the cooling water in the North Atlantic sinks well, aiding the power of the Gulf Stream. If the surface of the North Atlantic were to become rapidly fresher, it would not sink so well when it cooled, and that could stall the conveyor belt. The Gulf Stream would have nowhere to go, and would slow down, and sink farther south. Weather everywhere would change, becoming windier and drier in the Northern Hemisphere, and colder in places, especially in Europe.



The sudden desalination of the North Atlantic might seem an unlikely occurrence, but it has happened before. At the end of the last Ice Age, for instance, vast shallow lakes were created by the melting of the polar ice cap. Eventually these lakes broke through their ice dams and poured off into the oceans. The Canadian shield still sports the scars from three or four of these cataclysmic floods; one flowed down the Mississippi, one the Hudson, one the St. Lawrence.



These flows apparently stalled the world ocean conveyor belt current, and the climate of the whole world changed as a result, sometimes in as little as three years.



Now, would the Arctic sea ice, breaking into bergs and flowing south past Greenland, dump enough fresh water into the North Atlantic to stall the Gulf Stream again?



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