25

EN ROUTE TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN

Elizabeth’s message to Sean was pointed. He could hear her frustration through her words.

We’ve cross-checked everything we’re receiving from the buoys and correlated it with what NASA’s satellites long confirmed about what the Arctic connects to. That, along with the visual confirmations from the infrared camera, leaves only one conclusion. The amount of oil in the water is growing thicker by the hour. And you know what that means.

Sean knew the oil spill itself wasn’t what worried Elizabeth and her father. The truth, not widely known truth but that Sean had learned through Will’s work at AF and through the Shapiros, was that even truly bad oil spills and accidents like the Exxon Valdez and BP represented only about a tenth of the amount of crude oil that regularly seeped into the world’s ocean systems from millions of places. But accidents got headlines. A massive oil spill concentrated in a critical marine system like the Arctic Ocean, which was not only pristine but linked to nearly every other ocean and marine system in the world—that was unknown and largely unstudied.

Because no one had ever considered that there might be massive amounts of oil under the Arctic or that anyone could get at it, there had never been a need or demand to study or model its effects on the ecosystem. It was hard enough to get research money to study climate change in the Arctic, where global warming temperatures were two to three times higher than the rest of the planet. People had scoffed at researchers predicting an ice-free summer in the Arctic, until it had actually happened less than 20 years after the start of the twenty-first century. Then the rush to extract oil in the Arctic began, and AF got involved.

What happens in the Arctic could have repercussions almost anywhere on the planet. If critical food chain elements are damaged, the effects will ripple throughout most ocean species. Just as coal ash and soot from China substantially reduced the albedo effect in Greenland, causing the entire sheet of ice to nearly completely melt one year, the same sort of thing might happen if oil changed the Arctic. There’s no way to predict what might happen or how bad it could get. The world has a right to know what’s going on. Marine scientists, geologists, and others could then offer advice and research so we can get answers as swiftly as possible. The longer anyone waits to get the word out, the more dire the effects will be.

That was one of the reasons Sean was there. To see and hear the facts for himself so he could figure out a way to make a difference for good in this situation.

But the instant we write up anything like this that’s different from the official line coming from either AF or the White House, they’ll yank those buoys and the infrared camera right out of the water.

Our team is torn. After all, we’re not here to study oil. We’re here to study water, which now has oil in it. We have data, even though it’s limited. What is science supposed to do when that happens? It reports what it observes. Discoveries can be happy—or unhappy—accidents.

So we’ve decided to simply email a bunch of science friends with some very specific questions before we write and post a single word on our research blogs. The first one I’m going to ask is what anyone happens to know about methane hydrates in this part of the Arctic Ocean.

But with social media, as soon as they penned their first questions, the top would be off Pandora’s box.

Was Drew right—was there no winning this thing?

Still, Sean hated bullies. Especially government bullies. He’d never back down in doing what he knew was right.