Global Warming and Freezing to Death

“Are you worried about global warming?” asked Gerry. The sun was approaching the horizon and the whole world seemed daubed in red. Behind him the Berg glowed pink.

“You do realise it’s minus fifteen?”

“You know what I mean. Climate change.”

“I don’t think so,” said the Berg. “I’ve been around a long time… but before I was me I must have been snow and before that, water. If I melt I’ll just be water again.”

“That’s very philosophical of you.”

“I can feel it happening sometimes.”

Gerry looked at the enormous mass of ice looming over the boat. “What? Melting?”

“Maybe…  You know water is just H2O. Well, H2O is a funny old molecule.”

“You’re in a funny old mood. What do you mean?”

“Maybe it’s the sunset… “

Gerry snorted. “You were telling me about H2O.”

“Well there’s an oxygen atom, and two hydrogens, and they stick together because the hydrogens each share an electron with the oxygen – a covalent bond. They stick on like the ears on a Mickey Mouse hat. But the ears are a bit askew, and so the electrical charges are also a bit askew, so one end of the molecule is electrically positive and the other is negative. This means that each water molecule is attracted to those around it and they bond together with what are called hydrogen bonds. They’re not separate, but stick together in a giant cluster, a gel.”

“I think I’ve read this somewhere. More like one big molecule?”

“Sort of, but the bonds break and reform very quickly – under 200 femtoseconds. Anyway, all this means water has some odd properties – a very high boiling point for its weight, high surface tension… it’s why I float!”

The colour had drained from the sea and from the sky while the Berg talked. A cold wind made the suddenly slate sea break into chop. The hollow sound echoed up from where it slapped against the hull.

“That’s what I feel sometimes,” said the Berg. “The hydrogen bonds inside me are locked down, but on my surface, where I touch the water and the air, they’re fizzing away, spreading me out… ‘oceanic boundlessness’ as Freud might’ve said.”

Gerry regarded the Berg with sadness. “I’m sorry we’re melting you, we’re horrible sometimes.”

The Berg groaned and cracked like a gunshot. The water all around shivered.

“Ha! That’s very polite of you. I’ll last a bit longer yet though. My hydrogen bonds are very stable. It takes the same amount of energy to warm me from -160°C up to 0°C as it does to melt me.”

“Really? Wow.”

“Indeed.”

A silence fell between them. The sun was long gone. Hard, brilliant stars were appearing overhead. Gerry couldn’t feel his toes any more.

“You know,” said the Berg eventually, “you’re looking much healthier than you have been.”

“I’ve been eating O’Neill.”

“Oh.”

“When the lifeboat capsized his was the only body I could fish out. He’s been frozen down in the hold ever since.”

“Hmmm. What does he taste like?”

“I’ve got nothing to cook him with. Frozen, hairy, greasy, horrific pork? I don’t know. I can taste him in my mouth all the time but I’m trying not to think about it.”

“Sorry. I suppose it’s a bit like me and the water.”

“Just shut up, ok?”

Failing To See You're Freezing To Death

“Are you drunk?”

“No.”

“You swore to me there was no more booze down there!”

“I’m not fucking drunk!” shouted Gerry miserably. “I had grease on my glasses and I started running them under hot water and one of the lenses cracked because it’s minus fucking thirty. I can’t see shit.”

“Oh. Sorry.” The Berg glinted in the sunshine. “I thought you ate all the grease. And hot water?”

“Not edible grease. Grease grease. For the engine.”

“Hmmm.” The Berg drifted away from the boat a little as if to get a better look at Gerry; wavelets sploshed energetically against the hull. “Your head doesn’t look oversized.”

“My head’s not oversized! What’s that got to do with it? You’re really being very irritating today.”

“Sorry. Something’s too big though, more likely your eye than your actual head. That’s why you can’t see. Your eye focuses light on a point in front of your retina. If your eye was smaller you wouldn’t have a problem.”

Gerry kicked a bulkhead. “Well I do have a problem! I’m starving to death and freezing to death. I spend my days talking to a fucking iceberg. And now I can’t see!”

The Berg trickled sulkily. “Well, if that’s the way you feel… we don’t have to talk. I suppose it means nothing that I could help you get a new prescription.”

“A new prescription?”

“That’s the spirit!” said the Berg, butting against the boat and sending a clatter of shards on to the deck. “Have you got a ruler?”

“Uhh… I’ll see if I can find one.”

Gerry returned twenty minutes later to find the sun had gone in and the Berg floating in a stew of sea ice that had seemingly appeared from nowhere. The temperature had dropped alarmingly.

“Got it? Great. Now measure the distance between your eyeball and the lens you have left in your glasses. Actually don’t! It’s pretty nippy out here. Don’t want the ruler stuck to your eyeball. It’s probably a centimetre. We’ll say a centimetre.”

“OK. Where did you learn all this anyway?”

“I’m made out of ice. I’m reflecting, refracting, all that stuff. Optometry’s easy. Now. Which lens is broken? Left? So hold the ruler up to your cheek and close your right eye. Look along the ruler and move your finger towards you till you can focus on it. How far away’s that?”

“About ten inches.”

“Metric, man! We’re not barbarians.”

“Sorry. Maybe 25cm.”

“Wow, you are blind. OK. 25cm is your farpoint. That’s the point your left eye focusses at when it’s resting. If you weren’t myopic that’d be infinity.”

“Infinity?”

“Technically, yes. The moon, the stars, they’d be in focus.”

“Oh.”

“OK. So you need a diverging lens, one that’s concave on both sides. That’s more bad news actually.”

“More?”

“If you ever need to start a fire in the wilderness you have the wrong type of lens. It won’t focus the sun’s rays to a point.”

“That’s OK. When I get too weak to move I’ve still got a few matches and a cup of diesel put aside. I’m going to set the boat on fire and be warm again before I die.”

The Berg groaned and cracked. A tern that had been perched out of sight on its far side flew off across the water with a mournful cry.

“That’s the spirit! Getting your sense of humour back – that’s good, just let me know before you torch the thing so I can drift off a bit.”

Gerry smiled. He didn’t want to admit it but the Berg’s high spirits were making him forget the sense of hopelessness that had descended on him ever since the lens had cracked in his numb fingers.

“So your diverging lens will make things appear to be at your farpoint. It’ll move things all the way from infinity to 25cm from your face. Neat, hey?  We just need to figure out the focal length for your lenses. That’s just your farpoint in metres, so 0.25, minus the distance of your lens from your eye, call it one, so let’s say 0.24. You bang a negative in front of that and there’s your focal length! Negative 0.24.”

“I thought prescriptions were in whatsits… dioptres.”

“No problem at all. Dioptres are just a bullshit measurement that optometrists like to use. They’re just one divided by the focal length. So… one divided by -0.24 equals... -4.16.”

“Nice mental arithmetic.”

“Thank you. Now optometrists like the steps to be in 0.25 increments, so your prescription, Gerry, for your broken lens, is… -4.25!”

“Wait I thought you were getting me new glasses?”

“Pay attention. I said prescription. Where am I going to get new glasses? I’m an iceberg. The North Pole is just there over the horizon.”

Freezing to Death in a Gamma Garden

Gerry leaned against the binnacle and bit into the nectarine. Juice dribbled down his chin and he sucked frantically at the flesh of the fruit to avoid losing any more.

“Where on Earth did you find that?” asked the Berg.

“Below decks,” said Gerry, slurping greedily. “There’s a whole box of them.”

“But you’ve been eating nothing but pemmican for nearly two months now.”

“I must have missed them. Nooks and crannies down there. Yesterday I found a book of crosswords.”

The Berg cracked alarmingly. It was a sunny day and light blared back from its surface and hurt Gerry’s eyes.

“Nevertheless.”

Gerry shrugged and continued savouring the nectarine.

“They’re radioactive you know.”

Gerry spat the stone noisily overboard. “Bullshit.”

“Well, not strictly radioactive, but bred with the aid of radiation.”

Gerry, who had been about to go down to get another one, turned back. “Really?”

“Really. After World War Two everyone was trying to find peaceful uses for atomic energy. Just using it to vaporise Japanese people was giving it a bad name. They made atomic gardens to try and harness its mutagenic properties.”

“Wasn’t this a Simpsons episode?”

The Berg trickled furiously. The sunshine had made its whole surface run with meltwater.

“Don’t be facetious. It’s entirely true. They set up circular fields with a radioactive slug, cobalt-60 or something equally nasty, tied to a pole in the middle. The idea was you planted a wedge of a particular crop and let the radiation work its mutation magic. Close to the centre everything just died. Further back though you’d get weird effects like giant fruit or strangely coloured leaves and flowers.”

“Cool.”

“Actually, I’m finding it distinctly warm,” said the Berg.

“You’re very grumpy today. So what happened with the mutant plants? And how did they harvest this stuff?”

“The pole with the radiation source could be retracted into the ground, then workers would come in to examine what had happened to the plants.”

“Voila, radioactive nectarines.”

“Actually, peach trees mutated by radiation whose progeny are what, today, we know as the nectarine.”

“I’ll be damned. Any other successes?”

“Mint oil.”

“Mint oil?”

“Mint is particularly susceptible to a particular fungal wilt. The Americans irradiated hundreds of thousands of shoots and then planted them in wilt-infested fields. The resulting wilt-resistant cultivar, Todd’s Mitcham as I believe it’s called, is now the standard crop used in the world’s mint oil industry. You brushed your teeth with some this morning.”

“I ate the last of the toothpaste six weeks ago.”

“You’re going to wish you hadn’t when it comes time to get all those bits of nectarine out of your teeth.”

“Very funny. So, nectarines, mint oil… they give it up after that?”

“Oh, it’s still happening. Not as popular as back in the ‘60s and ‘70s but they still use it to try and breed new plant varieties today. The last success we know of was the ‘Rio Star’ – a particularly red variety of grapefruit.”

“That we know of?”

“It’s all very hush hush. Genetic engineering. Radioactive mutants. You know – things you don’t want associated with your product.”

“So how do you know about it?” asked Gerry, turning to head below deck again. The sun had moved and he was in the Berg’s shadow. When he tried to lick some of the nectarine juice from his beard it was already starting to freeze.

“A hippy who was down here in 1976 told me. They parked their boat alongside me for a few days. He used to like to come and and talk to me.”

“Talk to you? You’re an iceberg.”

“He was taking a lot of acid.”

  

Splitting the Atom and Freezing to Death

“God, I’m so bloody cold! I really don’t know how you can stand it!” screamed Gerry, breath exploding into a small cloud that froze and tinkled onto the deck. “Look! That can’t be good.”

“No, not good at all,” said the Berg.

“All this energy locked up around me too. If I had some magic power… If I could just split one measly atom I’d be warm as toast.”

“No, I did the numbers on that,” said the Berg dejectedly. “The phrase ‘splitting the atom’ is all very exciting, but really, you’re just getting a lot of atoms to move from one state to another - transmuting them - in fusion from hydrogen to helium, and liberating the difference.”

“Not with my bloody magic power. I’d split it. E=MC² Total mass to bloody energy!”

The Berg shifted uncomfortably.

“Even then it doesn’t work. Take hydrogen. The mass of 1 mole of hydrogen is 1.008g. In that mole there are 6.02 x 10²³ particles of hydrogen.”

“That’s a lot.”

“Indeed. So divide one by the other and you can see that the mass of a single hydrogen particle is 1.67 x 10^-24g.”

“That’s not much.”

“It’s 0.00000000000000000000000167 grams.”

“Especially when you put it like that.”

“And that’s molecular hydrogen, so two actual atoms. If we’re talking about a single atom it weighs half that again. Plug that into E=MC² and your magical power gives you 0.0000000752 joules when it splits the single hydrogen atom you’ve plucked out of the air.”

“Shit.”

“If we convert it to calories, to warm one cubic centimetre of water by 1 degree Celsius you’d need to split around 56 million hydrogen atoms.”

“Hand me the axe.”

The Berg laughed its deep laugh. Gerry felt it in his bones. The water around the boat vibrated.

“How did you get so good at maths, anyway?”

“Wolfram Alpha – that thing’s amazing.”

“Wait, you’ve got internet?”

  

Looking for Neutrinos & Freezing to Death

“Check out this diagram I found on Wikipedia.”

“I thought you said all your electrical equipment was dead? Like an ‘old packet of peas at the back of the bloody freezer’ I believe you said.”

“Never mind that, have a look.”

The Berg leaned forward to peer at the diagram, chunks of ice splashed into the water and clattered on the deck. The sounds were strange and hollow in the fog that had been there since dawn.

“Sorry. Hmmm, yes it all looks very neat doesn’t it?”

“It’s pretty bloody incredible.”

“That too. Just fill in the blanks hey?”

“Well we’re going pretty well on the matter side. Three quarks give you a proton, another three give you a neutron, pop in an electron or two from your bag of leptons and you’ve got an atom.”

“All that other stuff in your ‘bag of leptons’ though. Muons, Tau Neutrinos, what are they all for?”

“Search me. Maybe you build stuff with them in other dimensions.”

The Berg cracked alarmingly. “Haa! Yes, I expect that’s it.” It leaned forward again. A hunk of ice glanced off the wheelhouse and spun away into the fog. “Quantum Electrodynamics is the only one really holding up its end in the yellow bit though, isn’t it?”

“We’re waiting on the bloody Higgs Boson. If we find that then the Electroweak Theory’s looking great.”

“We?”

“You know. And Quantum Chromodynamics always comes out of experiments looking good.”

“It has eight different types of gluons which it insists on describing with such monikers as ‘blue/anti-green + green/anti-blue.’”

“It’s a weird world.”

“That it is… but… the elephant in the room?”

“Fucking gravity.”

The Berg tried to look sympathetic.

“I know, I know. Gravitons? Sorry, can’t detect them. Quantum Gravity? Sounds good – few contenders, something to test them against would help though.”

“Fucking gravity.”

They sat staring into the fog for a few minutes. Gerry’s eyes started to hurt, whether from gazing too long into the blank wall of the fog, or from the cold, he couldn’t tell.

“How do you know all this stuff anyway?” he asked the Berg.

“A few years ago a bunch of Russians came along and drilled a hole in me. They were going to look for neutrinos but the funding fell through. And one of them froze to death.”

“You talked to them too?”

“I wanted to, but I can’t speak Russian.”

Killing Whales & Freezing to Death

Gerry threw the orange into the water and slapped his hand against the gunwale in frustration.

“They can’t have thought that! That’s what we think now. They didn’t have the bloody scientific apparatus to magnify something that much.”

The Berg shifted slightly, voice amused: “So if you went and asked some stupid bogan what the surface of an orange would look like if you were one hundredth of a millimeter tall, what would they say? They don’t have the scientific apparatus either.”

“As a culture they do. They may not have ever used a scanning electron microscope, but they’ve seen enough trippy animation at the start of movies to know that things aren’t just… I don’t know, smooth.”

“Who says the ancient Greeks, or any primitive culture, saw the very small as smooth?”

“Well they can’t have seen it as bloody molecular, or atomic!”

“The Greeks saw it as atomic.”

“That was just a theory, an extension of Plato’s perfect forms. If they cut the skin of an orange smaller and smaller they wouldn’t get structure, cells walls, amino acids – they’d get tiny orange spheres. Ancient Greek atoms.”

“But that’s what we get now. It’s just a difference in how we get there.”

“Tiny orange spheres?”

“When you use your imagination to zoom in on this orange, down through cells walls and such, what do your atoms look like?"

“OK, coloured spheres.”

“Not electron clouds surrounding subatomic particles that are best described as probability densities?”

“OK! OK!” Gerry turned away and looked out across the grey ocean. There was a slight chop and the wind had turned even colder. The Berg loomed behind him, waves slapping against its base with a fractured, hollow sound.

“All I’m bloody saying,” he said, turning back to the wall of ice, “is that it would be interesting to know how ancient cultures imagined the very small, given that, although some of them may have possessed the philosophical idea of the atom, the vast majority did not. None of them had a microscope, and so would have been totally unaware of the minute complexity of everyday objects.”

The Berg rumbled in appreciation. “Well put. Yes, that’s an interesting thought. Personally I have no idea how they imagined such things. Nobody really got down here much except in the last one hundred years or so and they were all too busy killing whales and freezing to death to stop and chat.”