Hell Holes: What Lurks Below, Page 2

  Chapter 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. Whatever the reason, I will always be thankful for my little Latina chili pepper, the spice of my life who makes the best carne asada and cheese enchiladas in all of Alaska.

  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 is 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 the picture of the lit burner of a gas stove. “Methane is colorless, odorless, and highly flammable 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 point will be reached in the nex
t four to five years.”

  I tended to trust the more conservative climate models, but Angie was convinced that the pessimistic ones were more accurate. Truth be told, I feared she was right because every time we added missing feedback loops to our climate models, their predictions just got worse.

  My phone rang. Angie paused so that I could take the call. It was from Kevin Kowalski, an ExxonMobil manager for whom I’d occasionally worked as a consultant.

  “Dr. Oswald,” he said when I answered. “Thank God, I got you. We have a big problem, and I need you up here right away.”

  “What kind of a problem?” I asked, putting him on speakerphone so the others could hear. “Classes are about to start and I need to…”

  “Forget the classes,” Kowalski interrupted. “We have a disaster in the making up here. You know those huge holes that opened last year in northern Siberia?”

  “Sure,” I replied. “They’re probably just big sinkholes caused by the melting of subsurface ice or the melting of very large pingos.”

  “Huh? What’s a pingo?” Kowalski asked. To Kowalski, surface features were merely something that made life difficult when drilling wells and piping oil.

  “Pingos,” I replied, “are large conical hills of ice covered with a relatively thin layer of dirt. Anyway, what about the sinkholes? Are you telling me we’ve got one up on the North Slope?”

  “Damned straight,” Kowalski answered angrily. “In the last twenty-four hours, we’ve spotted over two dozen, and several have opened up near our oil wells. There’s one close to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline down near Pump Station 2, and I don’t have to tell you the hell there’ll be to pay if another one opens up under the pipeline. We’re facing a financial and environmental disaster, and I need you up in Deadhorse ASAP. How soon can you put a team together? We need to know what’s causing them and how likely it is that one will open under our facilities.”

  I looked questioningly at my wife and students. Angie nodded enthusiastically. Jill said, “Count me in,” and Mark added “Me, too.”

  “Okay, you can have us for a week, two weeks tops, but then we have to be back here so we can finish preparing for classes.”

  “How soon can you be ready?” Kowalski asked, his tone making it clear he would have preferred to have us up there yesterday.

  “We can pack our equipment and a few necessities and be ready to leave in four hours,” I answered, looking over at Angie for agreement.

  “That works for me too,” she said. Mark and Jill briefly looked at each other and then nodded their agreement.

  I checked my watch. “The drive from the University to Deadhorse is just under 500 miles, and this time of year, it shouldn’t take more than 14 hours or so. If we take turns driving and factor in a few short breaks, we could be up there in 20 hours.”

  Now some of you reading this account might think that 14 hours is one heck of a long time to drive 500 miles, but you don’t know the Dalton “Highway”. While some of it is paved, the rest is just a bumpy gravel road built to haul heavy-duty oil equipment up to the North Slope, which is why locals often simply call it the Haul Road. It also has many steep grades with no guardrails where it goes over the Brooks Range.

  “Excellent. I knew I could count on you,” Kowalski said. “But forget about driving. I had one of our aircraft take off 20 minutes ago to pick you up. You’ll find it waiting for you in front of the western-most hangar on the south side of the Fairbanks Airport when you arrive.”

  “You’re pretty sure of yourself, sending down a plane before you even call me,” I observed, not sure whether to be angry at his presumption that I would drop everything and come or impressed by his efficiency.

  “Seemed like a safe bet. What geologist is going to pass up an opportunity to be the first to investigate these holes? I suspect it could have been finals week, and you still would have found some way to come.”

  “I assume you’ll be supplying transportation, provisions, tents, and survival gear as well as a guide and someone to keep an eye on the local wildlife and ensure it keeps its distance?” I asked. “I don’t want to wake up one morning with a hungry grizzly or polar bear in our tent.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of everything,” Kowalski continued. “While you’re getting ready down there, I’ll fly over to Deadhorse and meet you there. My boss has made it crystal clear that this is my one and only priority until we know what we’re up against. See you soon.” Kowalski hung up, ending the call before I had a chance to say goodbye.

  “Well, I guess we’d better go and get ready,” I said, putting the phone back in my pocket.

  “Hello,” Angie said, pausing her presentation to address the strikingly beautiful young woman standing at the doorway. “Can we help you? You’re early; the graduate residence, Harwood Hall, doesn’t open for another couple of weeks.”

  In her early-twenties, she had long red hair that matched her dress, a scattering of freckles across her nose, and her emerald eyes were the greenest green I’ve ever seen. Definitely Irish, I thought to myself.

  “Funny,” she said with a smile. “It seems to me that my timing is just about perfect.”

  “Who are you?” I asked, somewhat thrown by her sudden appearance and unexpected remark.

  “Aileen O’Shannon,” she answered, walking up to me and reaching out to shake my hand. “I’m a reporter for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.” She looked at the others in the room and asked, “And your colleagues are?”

  As if her looking away had broken some spell, I realized that I was still holding her hand and quickly dropped it. “This is my wife, Dr. Angela Menendez, and these are two of my grad students, Mark and Jill Starr.” I said, feeling a bit guilty without knowing why. “How can I help you?”

  “I’m here to interview you about the holes that appeared up on the North Slope last night,” she answered, once again training her green eyes on mine.

  “I’m afraid you picked a rather poor time for an interview, Miss O’Shannon,” I said, taking a step backwards when I realized how close she was to me. “As you may have overheard, we’re leaving for the North Slope. Call my department secretary once school has started, and she’ll schedule the interview. By then I should have something to tell you. So if you will excuse us, we have to be leaving now.”

  “Forget the interview, Dr. Oswald. That won’t be necessary now that I am coming with you as your expedition’s photographer.”

  “Now wait a minute, Miss O’Shannon,” I said, irritated by her nerve presuming that I’d take a stranger with us up to the North Shore. “I already have my team, and we don’t need a photographer.”

  “Oh, but of course you do, Dr. Oswald,” she said with wry amusement. “Every expedition needs a professional photographer. Besides, my experience back during the summer of 2015 will prove useful. Have any of you been to the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia and actually seen the original holes there?” she asked, looking at each of us in turn. “I thought not,” she continued when no one immediately answered. “Well, it just so happens that I have. You’ve probably seen some of my photographs of the holes in Discover Magazine and on the Internet.”

  Though she may have had a point, I didn’t have time to deal with her. “I’ll think about it,” I said, trying to be as non-committal as I could. I looked at my wife and students. “Angie and Jill, why don’t you two go and pack what we’ll need while Mark and I crate up the equipment? We’ll haul it out to the airport and meet you there.”

  “Sure thing, honey,” Angie said sarcastically, giving me an exaggerated wink. “We women folk would just love to do our womanly chores while our big strong he men impress us with their manly muscles.” Jill gave Mark a hug and the reporter a glance that clearly signaled “hands off – he’s taken”. Then they laughed as they walked arm-in-arm out the door.

  Of course, Angie knew I was well aware that she was the athletic one. She may have put on a few pounds over the years, but we both knew she could easily bench press more
than I could. And Jill was the outdoor type who wasn’t afraid of getting her hands dirty doing fieldwork. I’d actually volunteered Mark and myself to pick up the geology equipment not because we were stronger than our wives but because I knew what I wanted to take and Mark knew how to pack it properly, having accompanied me on previous field trips. Mark was also the team’s best engineer when it came to maintaining the equipment and would know the tools to bring in case anything failed in the field.

  Out of habit, I stepped over to the chalkboard and erased the diagrams and notes from our discussion. When I turned around, Aileen O’Shannon was gone.

  …