Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 292

This week's picture prompt is by Colbriere A., Hong Kong, Thailand based photographer. This picture is taken at Lake Baikal, Russia back in 2015. They take amazing photos, and especially on their Facebook page which is more up-to-date with pictures. Loads of inspiration. 

A bit of a climate dystopian tale this week. 

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Break
I cracked an eye open once I registered thesound I was hearing. It was water … moving water; sloshing, splashing, movingaround. It had been a long time since I’d heard that sound outside of a panover a fire.

Bright sunlight glowed through the ice andI shuffled myself closer to the opening of the cave to get a better view. Alake. I could see, a lake.

I pulled a hand out of my sleeping bag tomove hair out of my eyes. I had to be seeing things. But no, it was stillthere, a huge expanse of water – wet, running water. But how?

And then I felt it, on my skin, the sun andthe heat of it. I hadn’t felt heat from the sun in over a decade. No one had.

Could it be true? Was it over?

Then I heard other sounds, people sounds,they were waking up all along the shore. There was laughter and high fiving. Ifought my way out of my sleeping bag to join them.

“What the fuck?! I thought I was seeingthings,” I called over to Jesse.

“I know, mate, it’s unbelievable. No more meltingice over a fire. And soon we should see some greenage.”

“Yeah but it won’t be green.”

“It won’t take long,” Maddie reassured me. “Notwith these temps, this is incredible.”

“The ice age is over!” The very wordsseemed incredible as I said them.

“You might be being a bit hasty there mate,”Marcus didn’t want me to get carried away. “Melting the surface of the water doesn’tmean it will stay this way for long. It is mid-July by the old calendars, thepeak of summer, and we aren’t seeing that kind of melt on anything else.” Hepointed towards the shoreline, and my eyes followed the arc as I looked at thesolid ice still up there. There wasn’t any dripping or rivulets of water.

“Don’t dampen his enthusiasm, Markus.”Maddie defended my excitement. “This is huge! Even if it is only brief, it’s abeginning.”

“Yeah, but are we high up shore enough? Willthe water rise? Otherwise we’ll need to find somewhere else to settle.” Marcuswasn’t going to be persuaded not to worry.

“Not just the water rising. If the cavesmelt we will need to find new homes. These were only caused by the developmentof the glacier when we were plunged into this. If there is indeed a melt goingon, we are going to need to find higher ground.” Brady had always been thepragmatic one.

“Can we all just take a breath, and enjoythis historical moment for a second?” Halle called over the noise.

We all quieted. She was our leader. Shekept us all on an even keel, and that wasn’t easy. We were all scientists withdifferent specialities and liked to express our opinions about everything. We’dbeen thrown together as it seemed only those that knew how to survive an iceage actually could survive one.

“The lake has begun to thaw, as we can allsee. This could well mark the beginning of the end of this stage of the iceage, or at least a shift in temperatures. But this is not just a result of theair temperature shifting a couple of degrees – it hasn’t risen enough to domore than create a thin layer of water on top, at most, which would quicklyfreeze again at sunset. I believe a warm current has come in from somewhere,and being that this is a land-locked lake, it concerns me what that might be.Plus the speed of the thaw; the ice was solid all day yesterday, no significantchange. This lake is over 300 miles long, what could thaw it so quickly, andovernight too?”

We all paused, our minds racing as welooked at each other.

“I can only imagine there’s a vent of some sortcausing a warm or even hot current,” Jordan offered.

I baulked. “You mean, seismic activity? Wedidn’t feel anything.”

“It might not be in this lake. It couldhave happened elsewhere and the warm or even hot water began flowing in and outfrom tributary rivers.”

“We need to science the shit out of this,”Parker stated. He liked the hustle of the team working together – in fact weall did, which is why we had come together. And he was right. We needed to getmoving and start running tests. Days were short when you had a lot to do.

I rushed back to my cave to get my equipment.It felt good to finally have a purpose again, one that ended with hope.