Category:

PROLOGUE

Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Alaska

"Watch your step, everyone," David Lees said through the bitingly cold and shrill wind that had seemed to whip up out of nowhere. "We're here to measure the ice, not fall through it."

The remark from Lees, a United States Geological Survey team leader, was meant to be humorous, but the expressions on the faces of his fellow staffers and the students accompanying them showed anxiety and concern. And with good reason. The Lamplugh Glacier had been the site of a catastrophic incident in June of 2016.

Normally, violent landslides and avalanches were caused by overly abundant amounts of rainfall, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. But the 2016 avalanche was believed to have been caused by ice that had melted inexplicably faster than any other such occurrence on record. Scientists at the USGS only knew it had happened because the incident was captured on seismic instruments that put the result as roughly equivalent to a five-point-two on the Richter scale.

Lees assumed the team's three college interns—all majoring in some combination of climatology, geology, and environmental science—knew all that. They had come here as part expedition and part work-study program to bear witness to the devasting effects climate change was producing on glaciers in general and in Glacier Bay in particular.

The interns didn't know the true purpose of the USGS team's exploration, what they were actually looking for with their probes of the relative thickness of ice and potential degradation of the permafrost.

"Why are we spending all our time down here?" asked a kid named Bellows who played football at Brown University. "Why aren't we where the action is?"

"You're referring to the north-and northeast-facing slopes, right?"

"I guess so. That's where the landslides took place."

"Because those areas are subject to mountain permafrost. Mountain permafrost is the ice in the cracks and crevices between the rocks that holds them together and helps stabilize steep slopes. Once the permafrost melts, the cohesion that had existed for thousands and thousands of years is jeopardized."

"So we're safe down here," assumed a female student from the California Institute of Technology named Shayna.

"Relatively. But we're here because research studies have revealed a dramatic drop in the thickness of the ice, even on the south-facing slopes."

Lees' remark seemed to reassure her. They had carried only light equipment with them from base camp located on a ship anchored in Glacier Bay itself. Each day, they had taken careful measurements at various levels toward scrutinizing the rate and severity of the ice melt. So far, the results had proven far more dramatic than Lees had been expecting. The situation had grown significantly direr since he had last explored the area two years before, further convincing him that estimates by top climatologists dramatically underestimated how fast the entire ice shelf was degrading and the devastating effects it would have on all life on the planet. And yet this reality raised the odds of the team being successful in its greater purpose of uncovering a secret buried in the ice for millennia, a secret that could change the world for the better.

"Ever get caught in a landslide yourself, Doc?" the kid named Bellows asked him.

"Yes, and it's an experience I have no desire to repeat," Lees said. "That's why we're in what's considered a safe zone."

He thought the rumbling he felt in the next instant was a product of his imagination. The looks on the faces of the others, though, told him they had felt it, too. Seconds later, Lees felt the frozen ground shaking beneath his feet. While the eyes of the rest of the team members looked toward him, he turned his gaze up toward Mount Cooper, a six-thousand-foot behemoth that dwarfed the glacier in its shadow.

A thick white cloud was rolling downward, expanding by the second until it seemed to stretch across the entire width of the mountain itself. It was at the first stages of a massive rock avalanche, boulder-sized chunks encased in ice taking on more mass from the snowpack clenching tight as the momentum gathered more and more steam.

"Everyone, follow me! Run!"

Lees failed to keep the panic from his voice. Gone was the excitement of the conditions being right to succeed where all other USGS teams working in these parts had failed. Gone was any thought other than finding some way to survive the thundering slide of rock, snow, and ice barreling toward them.

"Stay close! Run in pairs! Keep the person next to you in sight."

The thundering sounds drowned out the last of his words. The land beneath Lees seemed to be shaking, then alternately lifting and falling like some twisted amusement park ride. He had survived the last landslide he'd nearly been trapped in by squeezing into a crevice and holding his breath while praying he wouldn't be entombed there. He very much doubted any such crevice existed here on the southern slope of the Lamplugh Glacier, never mind one deep enough to fit all six members of his team. There was no way they could possibly outrun the avalanche, so they had to try to find some form of cover or shelter, which meant heading upward into the avalanche itself.