Hell Holes: What Lurks Below

By Donald George Firesmith

When hundreds of huge holes mysteriously appear overnight in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle, they threaten financial and environmental catastrophe should any more open up under the Trans-Alaska Pipeline or any of the many oil wells and smaller pipelines that feed it. An oil company sends a scientific team to investigate. But when t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Donald Firesmith
• Release date: Sep 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781684198627

Donald George Firesmith

A geek by day, Donald Firesmith works as a system and software engineer helping the US Government acquire large, complex software-intensive systems. In this guise, he has authored seven technical books, written numerous software- and system-related articles and papers, and spoken at more conferences than he can possibly remember. He's also proud to have been named a Distinguished Engineer by the Association of Computing Machinery, although his pride is tempered somewhat by his fear that the term "distinguished" makes him sound like a graybeard academic rather than an active engineer whose beard is still slightly more red than gray. By night and on weekends, his alter ego writes modern paranormal fantasy, apocalyptic science fiction, action and adventure novels and relaxes by handcrafting magic wands from various magical woods and mystical gemstones. His first foray into fiction is the book Magical Wands: A Cornucopia of Wand Lore written under the pen name Wolfrick Ignatius Feuerschmied. He lives in Crafton, Pennsylvania with his wife Becky, and his son Dane, and varying numbers of dogs, cats, and birds. You can learn more about the author by visiting his website: http://donaldfiresmith.com His magical wands and autographed copies of his books are available from the Firesmith's Wand Shoppe at: http://magicalwandshoppe.com

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Prologue

Though the sun had finally dipped behind the rounded mountains of the Brooks Range, the temperature remained well above freezing, leaving the ground moist from the morning’s rains. It was quiet except for the soft sound of the breeze blowing through the short shrubs and sedges that covered the tundra of the North Slope.

An arctic fox silently patrolled his territory. He sniffed the ground, following the scent of a female that had passed by earlier that evening. She had brushed against a bearberry bush, and he stopped to breathe in her enticing smell. She was in heat, and he hoped to father her second litter of the season.

Though the fox occasionally heard the distant rumble of big rigs driving north along the Dalton, carrying supplies to Deadhorse and the oil fields around Prudhoe Bay, he paid them no mind. The humans were several miles away, and unlike wolves and wolverines, they posed no threat.

The fox abruptly stopped, turning his head to the side in puzzlement. He heard a faint hum that seemed to come from the ground below him. It was a new sound, one that he had not heard before. It rapidly increased in volume until it became a piercing, high-pitched whine, far beyond the dull hearing of the humans in their trucks. In agony, the fox rolled on the ground, desperately pawing at his ears in a vain attempt to stop the pain. He yipped and whined, adding his voice to the faraway howling of wolves.

The sound suddenly stopped, replaced by a deep rumble as the ground beneath the fox began to shake. Slowly, foot by foot, a huge circle of tundra the size of a large pond began to push itself above the surrounding tundra. Carrying the fox upward, it rose until it reached the height of a caribou’s antlers. Along its circular boundary, loose wet dirt and ragged patches of plants fell off, forming a ring-shaped pile that surrounded the rising ground.

With a sharp jerk, the massive cylindrical plug of earth underneath the fox stopped rising and began sliding downward. No longer incapacitated by pain, the terrified fox sped across the quivering ground, running for his life as the plug continued its unrelenting collapse. He ran toward the edge, arriving just as the ground beneath him slipped below the short ring of loose and muddy soil that marked its circumference. With a desperate leap, the fox jumped up, landing on the ring’s slippery slope as the ground continued its collapse into the rapidly deepening crater. He slipped, sliding perilously backwards before desperately pawing his way back up and over the top. Once down on the solid ground surrounding the huge hole, he ran away as if he were chased by a pack of starving wolves.

The frightened fox was several hundred yards from the hole when the rumbling stopped. Still running for his life, he did not see the brilliant blue burst of light that shot skyward out of the huge crater. But he did see dozens of similar blue beams briefly light up the northern horizon. As suddenly as they appeared, the lights winked out. The fox did not stop until he had placed several miles between himself and the pit. Silence returned to the North Slope, while the scent of sulfur and decay filled the air above the newly formed hell holes.

1 - An Unexpected Phone Call

My name is Jack Oswald, and before the war, I was a geology professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It was the first week of August. The hot days of July were over, and chilly nights heralded the beginning of the brief Alaskan autumn. In three short weeks, nearly one thousand students would be swarming the campus, classes would begin, and summer would be officially over.

My wife and colleague, Dr. Angela Menendez, two of my grad students — Mark Starr and his wife Jill — and I were in a classroom in the Reichardt Building, a haphazard stack of gray monoliths that sat high on a hill above Fairbanks. The windows along the southern side of the second story classroom provided a breathtaking view of the heavily forested Chena River valley and the Alaska Range that stretched along the entire horizon.

That morning, we were helping Angie prepare to give a short talk at an upcoming TED Conference on the dangers posed by arctic methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas. She was presenting a draft of her slides, while Mark, Jill, and I asked questions and made recommendations. While I was intimately familiar with her work, I never tired listening to her clearly and methodically make her arguments and present her evidence as she led her audience to the logical conclusion she herself had reached as a result of her research.

In addition to being a highly-respected teacher and oft-cited research scientist, Angie is a fierce environmentalist. Woe to any climate denier who called climate change a hoax when she was nearby. Why she had ever agreed to marry a petroleum geologist like me is one of life’s little mysteries that I’ve learned not to question over our thirty years together.

Two of my favorite grad students, Mark and Jill Starr, had married that June and were as inseparable as Siamese twins. Mark was working on his doctorate researching climate-related changes in Alaskan glaciers. Tall, athletic, and ruggedly handsome, he would not have looked out of place on a movie set with his tousled brown hair and beard trimmed so short it always looked like he’d only started growing it the week before. Instead, he was turning out to be a fine glaciologist and geologist, a man who was as at home crossing a crevasse as he was working in our spectroscopy and advanced instrumentation labs.

Tall, slender, and two years younger than her husband, Jill was intrigued by all things permafrost, the subsurface layer of ground that has remained frozen since the last ice age. More specifically, she was fascinated by changes in the permafrost caused by the rapid warming of the Arctic due to climate change. After finishing her masters in geology, she was planning on following in Mark’s footsteps and earning her doctorate. Smart, driven, and intensely curious about everything involving permafrost, she hadn’t yet decided on the subject of her doctoral thesis. In June, she wanted to research the rapidly eroding coastline along the Arctic Ocean as the loss of sea ice enabled waves to form and wash away the newly thawed ground. A compassionate young woman, she had great sympathy for the inhabitants of native coastal villages being forced to move inland to avoid being swallowed by the sea. Last month, she wanted to study the loss of boreal forests as the ground beneath them thawed, forming swamps and toppling the trees like so many drunken roughnecks. This month, it was the formation of countless ponds as subsurface ice melted and the ground sunk. Next month, I fully expected her to change her mind yet again. Though technically one of my grad students, Jill’s deep interest in global warming had caused her to take nearly as many courses from Angie as she did from me, and it was a toss-up as to which of us would end up being her thesis advisor.

Me? During the school year, I taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in geology and did research in petroleum geology. During the short Alaskan summer, I also did field work and often consulted with the oil companies up on the North Slope. Mostly, my research helped them access more offshore oil from fewer onshore wells, thereby lessening the incentives for drilling in the dangerous Arctic Ocean.

So on that fateful morning, Mark, Jill, and I were listening to Angie give her presentation on the danger posed by methane.

Methane is the primary constituent of the natural gas we burn to cook our food and heat our homes, Angie said, as she displayed a slide showed a picture of the lit burner of a gas stove. Methane is colorless, odorless, and highly flammable gas that burns to form carbon dioxide and water vapor.

The slide changed to show a bar graph comparing methane and carbon dioxide. The bar labeled methane dwarfed the much smaller bar labeled CO2. Methane is also a powerful greenhouse gas that causes 86 times more warming than carbon dioxide. Although it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide, methane is potentially far more dangerous if it’s rapidly released.

Once more, the slide changed to display a graph of how the Earth’s average temperature has changed over the course of the last hundred million years. A large red arrow pointed to a sharp bump midway along the graph. We know that such a catastrophically rapid release is possible because it’s happened before. Fifty-five million years ago during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, atmospheric methane skyrocketed, and the average global temperature jumped at least 7°F and possibly even as much as 15°F. The polar ice caps melted, sea levels rose hundreds of feet, and equatorial regions became uninhabitable deserts. The impact on the biosphere was horrendous as numerous species were driven into extinction. She paused to let the scale of the disaster sink in.

Angie clicked the remote and the next slide appeared. It showed a cross section of ground with bones, tree roots, and prehistoric stone tools buried amid huge lenses of ice. "Permafrost is far more than mere soil and rock that has been frozen since the last ice age. It also preserves a great deal of frozen plant matter. Over the millennia, windblown dust has buried grasses, shrubs, and trees as well as the frozen remains of animals ranging in size from mammoths to mice. Most people are surprised to learn that there is roughly twice as much carbon stored in arctic soil as there is in the atmosphere. As the Arctic has warmed and the permafrost near the surface has melted, microbes have begun to digest this organic matter. Were all of the permafrost to melt, it could release roughly 1.5 trillion metric tons of carbon in the form of methane and carbon dioxide."

A new slide appeared, displaying what looked like a white chunk of ice. Another major potential source of methane is methane hydrate, which is nothing more than water ice with large amounts of methane trapped inside its crystalline structure. When the ice melts, the methane is released. The slide change to show the same chunk of methane hydrate, only this time it was on fire. It looked just like a burning chunk of frozen milk.

A new slide displayed a cross section of the earth’s crust with white areas buried under both the land and the sea floor. Great deposits of methane hydrate exist deep under the permafrost as well as in the frigid underwater sediments along the continental margins near the Earth’s poles, where the low temperatures and high pressures keep the water frozen and the methane safely trapped. Now, global warming is raising both soil and ocean temperatures, threatening to melt the methane hydrate and release its trapped methane into the atmosphere.

We in the scientific community are in overwhelming agreement about the grave danger posed by atmospheric methane. What we don’t yet know is the tipping point, the point where the temperature of the Arctic will produce a runaway positive feedback loop that causes a catastrophic release of methane.

The next slide showed several supercomputers and a screenshot of complex computer code. "Our climate models simply aren’t yet able to give us a precise answer. Some models say we can let the Earth’s temperature rise a further 7°F while others suggest a maximum rise of only 2°F, a threshold we are already rapidly approaching. The most frightening models are the ones that imply we’re already past the point of no return and the tipping