Polar Vortex

by Matthew Mather

The air in Hong Kong was terrible, the pollution so dense sometimes it was like a hazy fog, and acidic enough to make the eyes water.

Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong’s airport, was the busiest freight terminal on the planet and Terminal One was once the largest in the world. All of it built on an artificial island from dredged-up dirt reclaimed from the sea floor.

human bodies gave off about a hundred watts of energy. The same as an old incandescent light bulb. Twenty six of us meant almost three thousand watts of heating power, and we had to trap it in the higher reaches of the cabin.

The Earth’s usual state is no icecaps. Most of the last hundred million years there’s been no ice up here.” “Yeah, but what’s happening now isn’t natural,”

north magnetic pole

North magnetic pole moves 25 mi a year, moving towards Siberia

“Greenland is owned by Denmark. They claim a good chunk of the Arctic all the way to the Pole. Same as Norway.”

“Up here, my friend, are oil and gas and resources beyond imagining.

An-74 is smaller, specially designed for polar flying. The engines are on top and in front of the wings so the exhaust goes over the airfoil surface to increase lift for short take off. Clever. Russians are the masters of Arctic equipment.

“The north is warming up five times faster than anywhere south. Means all the oil and gas and natural resources that were under all that ice are now up for grabs. Norway, Denmark, Canada, the US and Russia are all arguing about who owns the Pole.”

aurora. “Charged particles from the sun—the solar wind—are funneled into channels by the Earth’s magnetic field. When they hit atoms in the atmosphere, it gives off light. The red”—he pointed high overhead—“is from oxygen atoms way above two-hundred kilometers, the blue over there from nitrogen, and the big green”—he traced the warbling ribbon—“is oxygen at about a hundred kilometers.”

“Scurvy caused the rise of the mafia.” “How’s that?” “When the English discovered that lemons could stop it, the best place to get lemons was Sicily back in the 1800’s. They charged a high price and it led to the creation of farming cabals that became the mafia.”

“The Russian population and economy was keeping pace with America until the 1980’s but now has collapsed by comparison.”

“This climate change that Bjorn speaks of? This is how Putin will defeat the great American enemy.

Not everyone loses with the changing climate—Russia wins, America loses. The north will open up for travel and shipping and resources.

Misinformation on climate change will win Russia the future of the world, the advent of the new Russian Empire. We’ve been around for more than a thousand years—what’s fifty years of waiting in this?”

“In Dante’s Inferno, the ninth level of hell—the final one—isn’t fire, but a lake of ice.

the last thirty years, the Arctic has lost ninety-five percent of its old ice?”

The Russians were the kings of the Arctic, there was no contest. They had huge tracked-transports, Arctic-modified hovercraft, and even the strange half-aircraft-half-ship vehicles like the massive ekranoplans.

A polar vortex was what they called the storm. Once-in-a-century events now seemed to happen once a year.

Up to the 1950’s, the Qing Dynasty of China had recognized the sovereignty of Tibet, which was later rejected by the People’s Republic of China. They’d begun a slow but steady campaign of damming up the rivers high in the Tibetan plateau, potentially blocking off rivers that supplied fresh water to two billion people in Southeast Asia.

monks—a special order called the tulku

tulku were Tibetan Buddhist Lamas, spiritual teachers, who had taken a vow to help all other sentient beings escape suffering in this world.