Part Seven

Making Things Work

Prologue

An ice-choked sea now covered much of the north. Vastitas Borealis had lain a kilometer or two below the datum, in some places three; now with sea level stabilizing at the minus-one contour, most of it was underwater. If an ocean of similar shape had existed on Earth, it would have been a bigger Arctic Ocean, covering most of Russia, Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and Scandinavia, and then making two deeper incursions farther south, narrow seas that extended all the way to the equator; on Earth these would have made for a narrow North Atlantic, and a North Pacific occupied in its center by a big squarish island.

This Oceanus Borealis was dotted by several large icy islands, and a long low peninsula that broke its circumnavigation of the globe, connecting the mainland north of Syrtis with the tail of a polar island. The north pole was actually on the ice of Olympia Gulf, some kilometers offshore from this polar island.

And that was it. On Mars there would be no equivalent of the South Pacific or the South Atlantic, or the Indian Ocean, or the Antarctic Ocean. In its south there was only desert, except for the Hellas Sea, a circular body of water about the size of the Caribbean. So while ocean covered seventy percent of the Earth, it covered about twenty-five percent of Mars.

In the year 2130, most of Oceanus Borealis was covered by ice. There were large pods of liquid water under the surface, however, and in the summer, melt lakes scattered on top of the surface; there were also many polynyaps, leads and cracks. Because most of the water had been pumped or otherwise driven out of the permafrost, it had deep groundwater’s purity, meaning it was nearly distilled: the Borealis was a freshwater ocean. It was expected to become salty fairly soon, however, as rivers ran through the very salty regolith and carried their loads into the sea, then evaporated, precipitated, and repeated the process— moving salts from the regolith into the water until a balance was reached— a process which had the oceanographers transfixed with interest, for the saltiness of Earth’s oceans, stable for many millions of years, was not well understood.

The coastlines were wild. The polar island, formally nameless, was called variously the polar peninsula, or the polar island, or the Seahorse, for its shape on maps. In actuality its coastline was still overrun in many places by the ice of the old polar cap, and everywhere it was blanketed by snow, blown into patterns of giant sastrugi. This corrugated white surface extended out over the sea for many kilometers, until underwater currents fractured it and one came on a “coastline” of leads and pressure ridges and the chaotic edges of big tabular bergs, as well as larger and larger stretches of open water. Several large volcanic or meteoric islands rose up out of the shatter of this ice coast, including a few pedestal craters, sticking up out of the whiteness like great black tabular bergs.

The southern shores of the Borealis were much more exposed and various. Where the ice lapped against the foot of the Great Escarpment there were several mensae and colles regions that had become offshore archipelagoes, and these, as well as the mainland coastline proper, sported many beetling sea cliffs, bluffs, crater bays, fossa fjords, and long stretches of low smooth strand. The water in the two big southern gulfs was extensively melted below the surface, and, in the summers, on the surface as well. Chryse Gulf had perhaps the most dramatic coastline of all: eight big outbreak channels dropping into Chryse had partly filled with ice, and as it melted they were becoming steep-sided fjords. At the southern end of the gulf four of these fjords braided, weaving together several big cliff-walled islands to make the most spectacular seascapes of all.

Over all this water great flocks of birds flew daily. Clouds bloomed in the air and rushed off on the wind, dappling the white and red with their shadows. Icebergs floated across the melted seas, and crashed against the shore. Storms dropped off the Great Escarpment with terrifying force, dashing hail and lightning onto the rock. There were now approximately forty thousand kilometers of coastline on Mars. And in the rapid freeze and thaw of the days and the seasons, under the brush of the constant wind, every part of it was coming alive.