Pitt could not help feeling a deep sense of sadness as they flew over the rookery's killing ground. The shore as far as the horizon seemed carpeted with the bodies of the comical little birds. The Addlie penguins were very territorial, and birds from other rookeries around the Antarctic Peninsula were not likely to immigrate to this particular breeding ground. The few survivors who might have escaped the terrible scourge would require twenty years or more to replenish the once numerous population of Seymour Island. Fortunately, the massive loss was not enough to critically endanger the species.
As the last of the dead birds flashed under the helicopter, Pitt leveled out at fifty meters and flew above the waterline, staring out the windscreen for any sign of the excursionists' landing site. Giordino gazed out his side window, scanning the open-water pack ice for any glimpse of Polar Queen, occasionally making a mark on a folded chart that lay across his lap.
"If I had a dime," Giordino muttered, "for every iceberg on the Weddell Sea, I could buy General Motors."
Pitt glanced past Giordino out the starboard side of the aircraft at a great labyrinth of frozen masses calved from the Larsen Ice Shelf and driven northwest by the wind and current into warmer water, where they split and broke up into thousands of smaller bergs. Three of them were as big as small countries.
Some measured three hundred meters thick and rose as high as three-story buildings from just the water surface. All were dazzling white with hues of blue and green. The ice of these drifting mountains had formed from compacted snow in the ancient past, before breaking loose and plowing relentlessly over the centuries toward the sea and their slow but eventual meltdown.
"I do believe you could pick up Ford and Chrysler too."
"If Polar Queen struck any one of these thousands of bergs, she could have gone to the bottom in less time than it takes to tell about it."
"A thought I don't care to dwell on."
"Anything on your side?" asked Giordino.
"Nothing but gray, undistinguished rock poking through a blanket of white snow. I can only describe it as sterile monotony."
Giordino made another notation on his chart and checked the airspeed against his watch. "Twenty kilometers from the whaling station, and no sign of passengers from the cruise ship."
Pitt nodded in agreement. "Certainly nothing I can see that resembles a human."
"Maeve Fletcher said they were supposed to put the second party ashore at a seal colony."
"The seals are there all right," Pitt said, gesturing below. "Must be over eight hundred of them, all dead."
Giordino raised in his seat and peered out the port window as Pitt banked the helicopter in a gentle descending turn to give him a better view. The yellow-brown bodies of big elephant seals packed the shoreline for nearly a kilometer. From fifty meters in the air, they looked to be sleeping, but a sharp look soon revealed that not one moved.
"It doesn't look like the second excursion group left the ship," said Giordino.
There was nothing more to see, so Pitt swung the aircraft back on a course over the surf line. "Next stop, the Argentinean research station."
"It should be coming into view at any time."
"I'm not looking forward to what we might find," said Pitt uneasily.
"Look on the bright side." Giordino smiled tightly. "Maybe everybody said to hell with it, packed up and went home."
"Wishful thinking on your part," Pitt replied. "The station is highly important for its work in atmospheric sciences. It's one of five permanently occupied survey stations that measure the behavior and fluctuations of the Antarctic ozone hole."
"What's the latest news on the ozone layer?"
"Weakening badly in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres," Pitt answered seriously. "Since the large cavity over the Arctic pole has opened, the amoeba shaped hole in the south, rotating in clockwise direction from polar winds, has traveled over Chile and Argentina as high as the forty-fifth parallel. It also passed across New Zealand's South Island as far as Christchurch. The plant and animal life in those regions received the most harmful dose of ultraviolet radiation ever recorded."
"Which means we'll have to pile on the suntan lotion;" Giordino said sardonically.
"The least of the problem," said Pitt. "Small overdoses of ultraviolet radiation badly damage every agricultural product from potatoes to peaches. If the ozone values drop a few more percentage points, there will be a disastrous loss of food crops around the world."
"You paint a grim picture."
"That's only the background," Pitt continued. "Couple that with global warming and increasing volcanic activity, and the human race could see a rise in sea level of thirty to ninety meters in the next two hundred years. The bottom line is that we've altered the earth in a terrifying way we don't yet understand--"