"Kim Stanley Robinson - Fifty Degrees Below" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Instead, Diane appeared to have read the letter and then ignored it, or rather,
considered how to use it to play him like a fish, and reel him back into NSF. Which she
had done very skillfully.
So now he found that he had to stifle a certain amount of resentment as he went up to
see her. He had to meet her secretary Laveta's steely eye without flinching; pretend, as
the impassive black woman waved him in, that all was normal. No way of telling how
much she knew about his situation.
Diane sat behind her desk, talking on the phone. She gestured for him to sit down.
Graceful hands. Short, Chinese-American, good-looking in an exotic way, businesslike
but friendly. A subtly amused expression on her face when she listened to people, as if
pleased to hear their news.
As now, with Frank. Although it could be amusement at his resignation letter, and the
way she had jiu-jitsued him into staying at NSF. So hard to tell with Diane; and her
manner, though friendly, did not invite personal conversation.
"You're into your new office?" she asked.
"My stuff is, anyway. It'll take a while to sort out."
"Sure. Like everything else these days! What a mess it all is. I have Kenzo and some of
his group coming this morning to tell us more about the Gulf Stream."
"Good."
Kenzo and a couple of his colleagues in climate duly appeared. They exchanged
hellos, got out laptops, and Kenzo started working the PowerPoint on Diane's wall
screen.
All the data, Kenzo explained, indicated stalls in what he called the "thermohaline
circulation." At the north ends of the Gulf Stream, where the water on the surface
normally cooled and sank to the floor of the Atlantic before heading back south, a
particularly fresh layer on the surface had stalled the downwelling. With nowhere to go,
the water in the current farther south had slowed to a halt.
What was more, Kenzo said, just such a stall in the thermohaline circulation had been
identified as the primary cause of the abrupt climate change that paleoclimatologists
had named the Younger Dryas, a bitter little ice age that had begun about eleven
thousand years before the present, and lasted for a few thousand years. The hypothesis
was that the Gulf Stream's shutdown, after floods of fresh water had come off the melting
ice cap over North America, had meant immediately colder temperatures in Europe and
the eastern half of North America. This accounted for the almost unbelievably quick
beginning of the Younger Dryas, which analysis of the Greenland ice cores revealed had
happened in only three years. Three years, for a major global shift from the worldwide
pattern that climatologists called warm-wet, to the worldwide pattern called
cool-dry-windy. It was such a radical notion that it had forced climatologists to
acknowledge that there must be nonlinear tipping points in the global climate, leading
to general acceptance of what was really a new concept in climatology: abrupt climate
change.
"What caused the stall again?" Diane said.
Kenzo clicked to the next slide, an image of the Earth portraying the immense ice cap
that had covered much of the northern hemisphere throughout the last ice age. The end
of that one had arrived slowly, in the old-fashioned linear way, melting the top of the ice
cap and creating giant lakes that rested on the remaining ice. These lakes had been held
in place by ice dams that were themselves melting, and when the dams had at last given
way, extraordinarily large floods of fresh water had rushed down into the ocean,
emptying volumes as large as the Great Lakes in a matter of weeks. Signs left on the
landscape indicated this had happened down the watersheds of the St. Lawrence, the