2312

Around their plateau, black lichenous spikes shattered in their thrust at the sky. Below them in the great U-valley the rock of the side walls had been ice-carved to curves like muscled flesh, scored by horizontal lines where boulders had been scraped across the granite hard enough to dig right into it-when one thought about it, quite an astonishing pressure.

The glacier itself was mostly a broken white surface, nobbled blue in certain patches. Though crevasse fields disrupted it frequently, the ice plain was fairly level across to the black ridge on its far side. Swan took off her sunglasses to look, then blinked and sniffed as a stunning white flash hit her like a blow to the head. She had to laugh-snorted-through her squint spotted Zasha approaching, and reached out an arm for a hug. “I’m glad I came! I feel better already!”

“I knew you would like it.”

The camp’s plateau made a perfect location for what was really a little hodgepodge of a town. After showing her the galley and getting her stuff stowed in the dorm, Zasha took her out to the edge that overlooked the glacier. Directly below the camp the ice was shattered all the way across to the other wall of the glacier. This apparently was the result of injecting liquid nitrogen between the ice and the bedrock. A certain amount of ice had been tacked down, but the ice over that had sheared off and continued on its way, shattered and slower, but still moving.

Downstream from that jumble there curved a deep gap in the ice. “That’s their latest experiment,” Zasha said, pointing. “They’re going to melt a gap all the way across, and keep melting the ice as it comes down. The ice downstream will slide away, and having cleared a space, they’re going to build a dam in the empty air, and when it’s done let the upstream ice come down to it.”

“Won’t the ice just flow over the dam?” Swan asked.

“It would, but they plan to build it so high that it will match the height of the interior ice cap. So ice will flow here until it rises up as high as the rest of Greenland, and then there won’t be any downward flow.”

“Wow,” Swan said, startled. “So, like a new ridge of the mountain range, filling this gap? Created while the ice is flowing down at it?”

“That’s right.”

“But won’t the ice up on the plateau just flow down other glaciers?”

“Sure, but if it works here, they plan to do it all the way around Greenland, except at the very north end of the island, where they’re trying to keep the sea ice park supplied anyway. They’ll corral what slides in up there, and slow the outfall, and that will keep the Greenland cap substantially in place, or at least really slow the melting down. Because it’s the sliding into the sea that makes it all happen so fast. So-we’ll stop up every break on the island! Can you believe it?”

“No.” Swan laughed. “Talk about terraforming! This must be a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers idea.”

“It sounds like it, but these are Scandinavians here. Plus the local Inuit. Apparently they like the idea. They regard it as a temporary measure, they said.” Zasha laughed. “The Inuit are great. Very cheerful tough people. You would like them.” A quick glance. “You could learn from them.”

“Shut up with that. I want to go down there and see what the bedrock looks like.”

“I figured you would.”

They went back to the galley, and over big mugs of hot chocolate some of the engineers in the camp sat with them and described their work to Swan. The dam was going to be made of a carbon nanofilament weave, somewhat similar to space elevator material, and it was even now being spun over foundation pilings drilled deep into the bedrock. The dam would rise from the ground, spun in place by spiderbots rolling back and forth and passing each other like shuttles on a loom. The dam, when completed, would be thirty kilometers wide, two kilometers tall, and yet only a meter thick at its thickest point. The structuring of the dam’s material was another biomimetic, the carbon fibers shaped like spiderweb strands but woven like seashells.