Cold Flood (Kea Wright Mysteries Book 1) Page 8

  There was an awkward moment of silence. Even Marcus looked at her oddly. He stepped up beside her. “Yes, thanks for that… Okay everyone, gather round. I want to show you the new bit of kit from France that the folks of Corvis have provided for us.”

  Feeling slightly embarrassed, Kea stepped back and hovered at the edge of the group. She felt, rather than saw, Julie stand beside her.

  “How’d I do?” Kea asked quietly.

  Julie shrugged. “You know when you were a kid in the backseat, and your mom would get fed up and say that if you didn’t stop whatever, she’d turn the car around? Except, you knew she’d never follow through? A bit like that.”

  “That bad?” Kea kept her eyes fixed on the volunteers as they listened to Marcus expound on his latest toy.

  “The content was good, delivery, not so much,” Julie tried, and failed to sound supportive. “What was that all about anyway?”

  Kea related the story that Tony had told her of someone laying a stretch of pipe outside Max’s tent. Julie rolled her eyes and groaned. “Probably a drunk camper… I hope.”

  Kea’s eyes flickered back around the group and caught Max staring at her, a playful smile pulling at his lips. “I’m not sure of anything anymore.” She noticed some volunteers huddling around Zoë as she opened her equipment cases.

  “What are those?” Derek’s hands twitched as if he were a child eager to play with a new toy.

  “They’re prototypes my company was working on for a while before we started to...” Zoë paused, “pursue other avenues. Never flown above a glacier before, though. I’m a bit worried about the air up there,” she waved up to the mountains. “I’ve been warned it might get quite choppy.”

  “Zoë’s going to help us map the area,” Kea added. “Both with imagery and lidar.”

  “Lidar?” Derek poked at one of the little propellers before Zoë swatted him away.

  “Light Detection and Ranging,” Zoë explained. “The drone fires pulses of laser light at the ground, calculating the distance between the earth and the drone. The laser is fired in rapid succession, building a three-dimensional point cloud of elevation data. We can drape the imagery we shoot over the resulting surface and create a detailed model of the terrain.”

  “It looks... pricey,” Derek said, although beside him Max snickered in derision.

  “Some more than others,” Zoë agreed. “The degree of accuracy depends on how well the drone can track its position with GPS and how well the sensors are kept stable during the flight. Kea’s given me the flight plans for the different sites, so these guys will be piloting themselves. Or at least that’s the plan.”

  “That’s Romulus,” Cole pointed to the larger of the two drones sitting on the gravel. Romulus appeared to be little more than an assemblage of cameras with an odd box strapped underneath. The cross-shaped frame was made of blood-red plastic with four propellers mounted at each end. “And that’s Remus.” The second drone was jet black, about the size and shape of a basketball with a square assemblage resting on top, its six propellers flush within the frame.

  “Resolution?” Max asked, a curious expression on his face.

  “Depending on how low, and how safely, I can fly them in these conditions,” Zoë emphasized, “probably about four centimeters.”

  Beside Zoë, Julie began to unpack her own gear. She carefully unfurled a length of wires onto the ice, then connected them to a large padded box strapped to her chest. In a matter of minutes, she had also assembled two large plastic rectangular frames made of white PVC pipes. She handed one to Cole, who acquiesced to the sudden recruitment with a strange grunting noise. She motioned for him to stand facing her so that they stood a meter apart. A loose wire connected the two lengths of tubing, which connected the box on Julie’s chest to the frames she and Cole held.

  “Marcus has asked me to give you all a brief on my dissertation project, so here it is.” Julie tapped the device on her chest. “Ground-penetrating radar, or GPR, uses radio pulses to create a picture of the ice’s internal structure. Basically, it allows us to see through the ice and map any features inside it.” Julie nodded at the frames she and Cole were holding. “These antennae send high-frequency radio waves down into the ice, which bounce back up to the surface where we collect them. When the waves encounter an object or layers of sediment, it changes or scatters the waves that we can detect when they return.”

  Reynard stepped closer to inspect the device. “What’s the range of the signal?”

  Julie fiddled with the chest unit. “It depends on the material and the amount of water. In this area, we’re probably looking to get reflections up to thirty meters deep in the ice.” The unit emitted a loud beep, and she nodded to Cole. “Okay, now we move together. You take one step back, I take one step forward.”

  Cole looked behind him and gingerly took a step back as Julie moved toward him. Kea watched with the others as Julie indicated for Cole to step again.

  “Each transect is gridded out ahead of time,” Marcus picked up the narrative so that Julie and Cole could keep moving in tandem. He pointed to the rope laid out on the ice in a simple grid pattern. “The grids provide two-dimensional slices of the underlying surface,” he continued as Julie and Cole performed their slow dance.

  “When we get back tonight,” Julie continued, “I can reconstruct the two-dimensional slices into a full three-dimensional model if anyone wants to see what’s beneath our feet.”

  “Right!” Marcus rubbed his hands together as if washing them clean of Julie’s project. “We’ll break out into teams and rendezvous back here later.” He looked at his watch and glanced at the sky. “It’s just about noon, and since the sun doesn’t set till about ten o’clock tonight, we’ve got plenty of time. Let’s meet up back here around, say five?”

  “Team GPR, with me,” Julie waved over Amirah, Bonnie, and Erik.

  “Thermal drill team?” Marcus asked the group. Tony, Bruce, Derek, Jon, and Reynard raised their hands. “You’re with me.”

  “Everyone on Team Kea,” Kea raised her arm, “follow me.”

  “Anyone on the drone team,” Tony called out, “remain here with Zoë.”

  Kea was surprised to see how annoyed Cole looked as he skulked over to join his mother. In contrast, Nadia, Lexie, and Tiko hovered by the drones, watching Zoë as she prepped the control unit.

  Marcus led the remaining teams upslope. Once again, Kea followed up the rear in case anyone needed assistance. Some of the younger members of the team didn’t have much difficulty, despite never having walked on a glacier before. Others moved more cautiously, their limbs sticking out like scarecrows as they tried to find their glacier legs. She matched strides with Bruce, grateful for his slow and measured pace. The walk back, and the field work for the next week, would be strenuous, and she was happy to save her energy and her calves.

  In front of her, Jon and Erik whispered conspiratorially as they fell into step behind Max, shooting glances over their shoulder back at her.

  No, she realized with a chill, not at me. At Bruce.

  Bruce seemed oblivious to their attention. Instead, he kept pausing to take pictures, even stopping to pop interesting rocks into his satchel. Kea felt as if she were escorting him on a seaside jaunt and couldn’t help but smile at his antics. She caught Derek staring at her again, and she met his gaze with a look that she hoped would melt steel. He looked away, guiltily.

  At least he’s not hitting on me anymore.

  As if hearing her thoughts, Derek looked back at her and blew her a kiss.

  Kea groaned.

  ***

  “It looks so... organic,” Erik dumped his pack next to Kea’s equipment.

  After another hour of hiking, they set up at a location near the glacier’s western edge. Here, the ice was covered with tephra, as if blackened with soot. The undulations of the glacier surface and a dense forest of dirt cones that surrounded them obscured their view of the other teams.

  “Eh?” Kea look
ed up from her mini-computer. Erik stood atop a hillock of ice and stared down into the proglacial depression that stretched between the glacier margin and the abandoned elevated outwash plain.

  Erik was decidedly anti-fabric, Kea noticed. The man wore only a black tank top, his biceps flexing with every gesture. His well-defined lats gave his torso a perfect V-shape that she’d only seen on Baywatch.

  While the sunlight was bright and warm, she was content inside her jacket. She plopped down on the ice, crossed her legs, and plugged a storage drive into a port on the side of the crate.

  “The esker,” Erik waved at the landforms below them. “The way the flood deposits spew out from the esker’s mouth, all the kettle holes. It looks like an open wound.”

  “The event was certainly violent,” she agreed, keeping her eyes on her work. “But that wound is a pattern we hope to find repeated throughout the historical record so we can identify other periods when jökulhlaups occurred.”

  She heard the artificial click of his phone as Erik took pictures of the landscape. As the shutter sounds moved closer, she noticed he was taking photographs of her. She posed with a grin, squinting in the bright sunlight.

  “Your job is pretty awesome.” He snapped a few more pictures of the glacier. “Who wouldn’t want to come to work every day?”

  “I’m not complaining,” she shrugged. “Well, not much. At least not in the last hour. How about you? What does T3 actually do?”

  “We used to do a lot of software development for telecommunications companies.” Erik fished around in his pack and withdrew a candy bar. “We got new partners recently and now we do a bit more in the realm of deep learning and artificial intelligence.”

  Glancing up from her equipment, Kea noticed Nadia strolling in their direction. She saw no sign of the others, but she wasn’t too bothered. Since calibrating her equipment could take time, she gave them permission to wander around while she finished setting up, reminding them to remain within shouting distance.

  “You guys build artificial intelligence devices?” Kea turned back to Erik.

  “Not exactly. We partner with larger companies as needed. You know how it is.” He seemed reluctant to provide any more details and wandered further away, taking more pictures as he went.

  “He’s a good guy, really, just shy,” said a gruff voice behind her. “Not as bad as Jon, though.”

  Kea swiveled on her rear to see Max standing behind her, eating a sandwich. She nodded absently and turned back to peer intently at her screen. The sunlight was so bright that it was difficult to tell if the computer was even switched on. “Bruce mentioned that your team… has a wide range of personalities.”

  Max grunted. “We’re an unusual bunch, I admit, but start-ups always attract the odd ones. It takes a certain kind of person to throw off the safety nets and start your own company.”

  “I suppose,” Kea said. She used her lunch bag to shield the screen and was relieved to see that the computer was already halfway through its booting sequence. “It does sound exciting though. I take it the idea is to get bought out at a certain point?”

  “Depends on who you ask,” Max commented. “I kinda like not working for a big company. Of course, if the buy-out’s big enough, who am I to say no to retiring early in the Caribbean?”

  “Is that likely?” Kea asked. “Not being nosy, just wondering if I should start my own someday.”

  Max laughed loudly at that. She wondered if she should feel offended.

  “We’ll see. We’ve got some products in the pipeline that we’re excited about.” He sounded thoughtful, not as brash as Kea had come to expect. “Had a couple rocky starts, but we think we’ve got some great ideas that are ahead of the curve. The trick is to find a niche before anyone else does.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir,” Kea replied. “Academia’s no different. You have to find a research project, collect the data and publish before anyone else just to survive.”

  “Competitive,” Max agreed. “But for less profit, I imagine.”

  “It depends on the field,” Kea admitted. “But when it comes to glaciers, most aren’t in it to earn the big bucks.”

  Max snorted. “Is anyone else out here on the ice doing similar work?”

  “Not that I know of,” Kea said. “Although we’re only here for a short time, so you never know. This site does get teams from all over the world.”

  “Aren’t you worried about other scientists stealing your research?” He sounded almost excited at the prospect.

  If you only knew, Kea didn’t say. “It’s possible, but the community’s fairly small. Once you get a reputation for doing that, you’ll have a hard time finding other people willing to work with you.” She tried to focus on the instrument in front of her, rather than let herself get aggravated by dwelling on Marcus again.

  “Must be nice to have that kind of transparency.” Max packed away the remains of his lunch. “Industrial espionage costs us a small fortune.”

  “That’s not to say it doesn’t happen,” Kea said. “I know some academics will do nearly anything for tenure.”

  One might be on this glacier right now, she thought as she watched Max wander away.

  “What does this do, exactly?” Nadia, bored with sightseeing, squatted beside the ice chest, frowning at the knobs and readouts.

  “It’s a magnetic resonance sounding device,” Kea proudly tapped the casing. “We lay out those wires and use them to measure the electrical field. The MRS sends an electric pulse through the wire hoops, applying an electrical field into the subsurface. Then we switch off the field and measure the magnetic resonance, that is the time it takes for the water molecules to return to their original magnetic state.”

  “Okay,” Nadia said. She waited for a beat. “Why?”

  “It’s a fairly common technique used to measure the level of groundwater in aquifers,” Kea explained. “It’s usually done on a ground surface, but for now...”

  “For now?” Nadia asked.

  Kea shifted uncomfortably on the ice. “I saw a talk where someone did this on the ice sheets in Greenland last fall, and I’ve been dying to give it a go ever since. Of course, the talk was about an aquifer near the surface of the ice, describing water flowing through compacted snow. We’ve got a completely different situation here, so I have no idea what I’m going to find, if anything.”

  “It kind of sounds like you’re making this up as you go along,” Nadia teased.

  “Does it? How fascinating.” Kea kept working, intent on her task. “Hand me that bit of wire, will you?”

  Nadia was silent for a full thirty seconds. “Why do you think it won’t work?”

  “I didn’t say it wouldn’t work, I just don’t know what I might find…” Kea began, uncertain about how much detail to go into, “most of the water in Alpine glaciers flows through crevasses, conduits, and moulins but not through an aquifer.”

  “What’s a moulin?”

  “Hmm...” Kea grumbled as she attempted to thread the wire back into the adapter. Not for the first time she regretted not having flashcards so she could just hand definitions out when asked. “As the ice melts on the surface, some of it burrows a path straight down, like a well or a giant plug hole. Some may grow over a hundred feet wide and several times that deep. And you know what they say, once you go down a moulin ...” She let her words trail off.

  “Yes?” Nadia prompted.

  “You never come back out,” Kea finished with relish.

  Nadia frowned as if sensing that Kea was messing with her. “Is that true?”

  “Well, bits of you might,” Kea admitted. “This close to the margin, some do flow out the front of the glacier straight into the lake. Most, however, flow down to the ice-rock interface. If you did eventually come out the front of the glacier, it’d be a bit of a case of the Humpty-dumpty’s.”

  “That’s horrible,” Nadia said in disgust.

  “That’s science.” Kea tucked her pencil in her mouth
.

  There was another pause, a minute this time, until Nadia finally asked, “Wait, are you saying you really don’t know what you’re doing?”

  Kea smiled wryly. “I have planned out, to the letter, nearly every day of this twelve-week expedition.” She sat on her heels, reflecting on how long, and yet how quickly, the last four months had passed. “Sometimes,” she continued, “you have to try something different, test something strange, just to see. I spend most of the year cooped up in my office reading about experiments other researchers are trying all over the world, and it gets my creative juices flowing. Now, this may not tell me anything at all, but if it does, you’ll be in the acknowledgment section.”

  ***

  Four MRS surveys and an hour later, the batteries clocked out. Kea mentally kicked herself for not remembering to pack a spare, although she wasn’t sure it would have made a difference. Compared to the readings she had taken on dry land, the data she collected here was puzzling, to say the least. The Greenland work had been done on compacted snow, not glacial ice, which might explain why her data was off. Although there had been that one paper on Svalbard, she remembered. She considered sending the authors of that paper an email later to check the settings they’d used on that glacier because, quite frankly, a lot of her readings were complete nonsense.

  It was only going on three o’clock, and the sun was still high in the Arctic sky so, with the help of the volunteers, Kea packed up her gear and relocated the team to a site at a lower elevation near the western edge of the glacier. Here, the massive cliffs of Lómagnúpur trapped the moist winds and the frequent rainfall. That, combined with the vast amounts of tephra on the surface of the glacier, resulted in thousands of streams and rivulets that incised into the ice. The intricate drainage network had carved out a badlands of irregular hills, tiny narrow valleys, and chasms. Speckled with dark tephra, the skin of the glacier was irregular here, scalloped into sharp ridges that towered above the streams. She had nicknamed the area the wildlands.