Lewis Steinberg looked out of his side window. All he could see was the blue Arctic Ocean far below him, where was the ice? He looked again as they crossed over Tasiilaq village fronted by Kong Olaf Havn, the deep anchorage offshore, sheltered at its back from the Southern winds by the 2,000 metre bulk of Qaqqartivakajik - Sailor’s Peak. There were no icebergs in the Havn, unknown for this time of year. The usual procession of the monsters Southwards down Ammassaliq Fjord was also missing.
‘What do you think is going on Jeff?’ he said, looking across to his Captain in the left seat who was flying the 747- 400 on this leg from Heathrow to New York.
‘I’ve no idea Lew,’ said Jeffrey Cognos, ‘the weather is normal but there is no sea ice and no free icebergs. All we can do is report it to the scientists when we get to Kennedy and they can figure it out. Something weird is happening, that’s for damn sure.’
Sven Rasmussen of the Danish Geological Survey leaned over the side of the open fibreglass boat that was being driven with some elan by Dinas, who delighted in the power of the twin Evinrude 115 HP outboard motors clamped to the transom. Sven had hired Dinas and his boat to carry out some survey work around the fjords. Dinas had his own tourist business so with this being the off season, he was glad to have the business from the DGS. Normally it would be impossible to cream down Ammassaliq Fjord in February as it would be frozen solid to a depth of over a metre with many icebergs locked in place. Today it was an expanse of open water, shining cerulean blue under a clear sky.
Sven was taking samples of the water to check the salinity. Normally it would be less salty than the open sea because of the icebergs melting. Today it was as saline as the sea. He asked Dinas to travel North and to get as close as possible to the snout of the famous Rasmussen glacier. It was not named after Sven, much as he would like it to have been, but after the 19th century explorer.
‘How am I going to shoot enough seals to feed my family if I can’t get my sled and dogs out on the ice?’ asked Dinas. ‘I need at least twenty seals a season. When are you clever scientists going to figure out what is going on so that we can get everything back to normal? I think you low latitude people have stuffed us Inuit yet again.’
‘I’ve got no answers,’ said Sven but I am doing my best to find out.’
They approached the snout of the normally highly productive glacier and could see something strange was also going on here. The glacier front normally floated out into the bay until it could not support its own weight and then great house-sized lumps of 15,000 year old ice calved off and were set free as icebergs. Today the glacier front was sloping down to the sea and disappearing under the surface. There were no icebergs being produced. Sven had spent many years in Greenland but he had never seen anything like this. He asked Dinas to moor his boat near the ice so that he could jump on to it and collect some samples. When he tested then, he found that the ice was 2% more dense than normal and so it no longer floated on the sea water. This explained the sinking glacier front, the lack of icebergs and the dearth of sea ice but what was causing it?
The canteen was nearly full. The scientists were celebrating a very successful run of the LHC. They had collected a mass of data and would start analysing it in the morning but now it was a time to celebrate. Normally alcohol was not allowed at CERN but today an exception had been permitted by the staid Swiss Head of Science. Most had a glass of whiskey in hand and the day’s success was toasted. Alice Fermi from the USA looked at her half empty glass and asked her colleague Ernest Dirac from the UK if he could see anything strange in the glass.
‘Well, it’s unusual to see you drinking whiskey that you have paid for,’ said Ernie, ‘Apart from that it looks OK to me.
‘Come with me to the bar then,’ said Alice.
‘A large glass of water please, with plenty of ice,’ said Alice to the barman.
Ernest looked in astonishment as the ice cubes sank to the bottom of the glass.
‘I was afraid of this happening, the tau neutrinos we have been producing and sending down to Italy have spread through the globe and have changed the crystalline structure of water ice so that it is now heavier than water.’
‘So what?’ said Ernie, ‘ it’s no big deal, it just means we will have to stir our drinks a bit more to keep them cool.’
‘It is a bit more than that.’ said Alice. ‘In fact it is the beginning of the end of the world. Every time it snows, the snow and ice will sink to the bottom of the ocean and that water will be lost from the water cycle. Eventually there will be no more rain and the Earth will dry out and turn into one big desert. There will be no crops, so no food so we will all die.’
‘Yes, we shouldn’t have messed around with those FTL tau neutrinos.’ acknowledged Ernie.
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