 First edition cover | |
| Author | Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Pocket Books |
Publication date | July 1, 1998 |
| ISBN | 0-671-01402-1 |
Icefire (1998) is a novel written by Canadian writers Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. [1] [2] [3]
| First edition cover | |
| Author | Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Pocket Books |
Publication date | July 1, 1998 |
| ISBN | 0-671-01402-1 |
Icefire (1998) is a novel written by Canadian writers Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. [1] [2] [3]
Icefire is an action/science fiction novel about an unknown group using the Ross Ice Shelf to create a soliton wave—much more powerful and destructive than tsunamis caused by seismic displacement—directed into the Pacific Ocean. Roughly the size of France, the Ross Ice Shelf is first broken free of its shoreline anchor points by tactical nuclear weapons detonated around its periphery. A larger nuclear device is then airburst above the Shelf, slamming the entire mass of loose ice into the Ross Sea beneath it and generating the monster wave.
The EMP from the airburst warhead disables most electronics within its line of sight, blinding the world's satellites and silencing radio communication from the area.
The main protagonists, Mitch Webber and Cory Rey, must escape the communication dead zone in time to tell the world what happened, warn everyone of the deadly wave racing towards it, discover who set it in motion, and find a way to catch the villains and stop the wave—if they can.
The destruction caused by the bombs and people's understandable skepticism are working against them as, with every passing second, the wave gets closer to major cities and their unsuspecting populations.
An iceberg is a piece of freshwater ice more than 15 meters long that has broken off a glacier or an ice shelf and is floating freely in open water. Smaller chunks of floating glacially derived ice are called "growlers" or "bergy bits". Much of an iceberg is below the water's surface, which led to the expression "tip of the iceberg" to illustrate a small part of a larger unseen issue. Icebergs are considered a serious maritime hazard.
The Ross Sea is a deep bay of the Southern Ocean in Antarctica, between Victoria Land and Marie Byrd Land and within the Ross Embayment, and is the southernmost sea on Earth. It derives its name from the British explorer James Clark Ross who visited this area in 1841. To the west of the sea lies Ross Island and Victoria Land, to the east Roosevelt Island and Edward VII Peninsula in Marie Byrd Land, while the southernmost part is covered by the Ross Ice Shelf, and is about 200 miles (320 km) from the South Pole. Its boundaries and area have been defined by the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research as having an area of 637,000 square kilometres (246,000 sq mi).
The climate of Antarctica is the coldest on Earth. The continent is also extremely dry, averaging 166 mm (6.5 in) of precipitation per year. Snow rarely melts on most parts of the continent, and, after being compressed, becomes the glacier ice that makes up the ice sheet. Weather fronts rarely penetrate far into the continent, because of the katabatic winds. Most of Antarctica has an ice-cap climate with extremely cold and dry weather.
McMurdo Station is an American Antarctic research station on the southern tip of Ross Island, which is in the New Zealand–claimed Ross Dependency on the shore of McMurdo Sound in Antarctica. It is operated by the United States through the United States Antarctic Program (USAP), a branch of the National Science Foundation. The station is the largest community in Antarctica, capable of supporting up to 1,500 residents, and serves as one of three year-round United States Antarctic science facilities. All personnel and cargo going to or coming from Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station first pass through McMurdo. McMurdo Station continues to operate as the hub for American activities on the Antarctic continent. By road, McMurdo is 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) from New Zealand's smaller Scott Base.
The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest ice shelf of Antarctica. It is several hundred metres thick. The nearly vertical ice front to the open sea is more than 600 kilometres (370 mi) long, and between 15 and 50 metres high above the water surface. Ninety percent of the floating ice, however, is below the water surface.
An ice shelf is a large platform of glacial ice floating on the ocean, fed by one or multiple tributary glaciers. Ice shelves form along coastlines where the ice thickness is insufficient to displace the more dense surrounding ocean water. The boundary between the ice shelf (floating) and grounded ice is referred to as the grounding line; the boundary between the ice shelf and the open ocean is the ice front or calving front.
The McMurdo Sound is a sound in Antarctica, known as the southernmost passable body of water in the world, located approximately 1,300 kilometres (810 mi) from the South Pole.
Iceberg B-15 was the largest recorded iceberg by area. It measured around 295 by 37 kilometres, with a surface area of 11,000 square kilometres, about the size of the island of Jamaica. Calved from the Ross Ice Shelf of Antarctica in March 2000, Iceberg B-15 broke up into smaller icebergs, the largest of which was named Iceberg B-15-A. In 2003, B-15A drifted away from Ross Island into the Ross Sea and headed north, eventually breaking up into several smaller icebergs in October 2005. In 2018, a large piece of the original iceberg was steadily moving northward, located between the Falkland Islands and South Georgia Island. As of August 2023, the U.S. National Ice Center (USNIC) still lists one extant piece of B-15 that meets the minimum threshold for tracking. This iceberg, B-15AB, measures 20 km × 7 km ; it is currently grounded off the coast of Antarctica in the western sector of the Amery region.
An air burst or airburst is the detonation of an explosive device such as an anti-personnel artillery shell or a nuclear weapon in the air instead of on contact with the ground or target. The principal military advantage of an air burst over a ground burst is that the energy from the explosion, including any shell fragments, is distributed more evenly over a wider area; however, the peak energy is lower at ground zero.
The Tunguska event—an enormous explosion in a remote region of Siberia on 30 June 1908—has appeared in many works of fiction.
Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens are a New York Times-bestselling husband-and-wife writing/producing team. In June, 2013, at the Constellation Awards ceremony in Toronto, the writing couple were honored with the Constellation Award for "Outstanding Canadian Contribution to Science Fiction Film or Television" for their role in creating the series, Primeval: New World.
The Time Traders is a science fiction novel by American writer Andre Norton, the first in The Time Traders series. It was first published in 1958, and has been printed in several editions. It was updated by Norton in 2000 to account for real world changes. It is part of Norton's Forerunner universe.
The Arctic Ocean is the smallest and shallowest of the world's five oceanic divisions. It spans an area of approximately 14,060,000 km2 (5,430,000 sq mi) and is the coldest of the world's oceans. The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) recognizes it as an ocean, although some oceanographers call it the Arctic Mediterranean Sea. It has also been described as an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean. It is also seen as the northernmost part of the all-encompassing world ocean.
Antarctica is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean, it contains the geographic South Pole. Antarctica is the fifth-largest continent, being about 40% larger than Europe, and has an area of 14,200,000 km2 (5,500,000 sq mi). Most of Antarctica is covered by the Antarctic ice sheet, with an average thickness of 1.9 km (1.2 mi).
Ice calving, also known as glacier calving or iceberg calving, is the breaking of ice chunks from the edge of a glacier. It is a form of ice ablation or ice disruption. It is the sudden release and breaking away of a mass of ice from a glacier, iceberg, ice front, ice shelf, or crevasse. The ice that breaks away can be classified as an iceberg, but may also be a growler, bergy bit, or a crevasse wall breakaway.
Infragravity waves are surface gravity waves with frequencies lower than the wind waves – consisting of both wind sea and swell – thus corresponding with the part of the wave spectrum lower than the frequencies directly generated by forcing through the wind.
A meteor air burst is a type of air burst in which a meteoroid explodes after entering a planetary body's atmosphere. This fate leads them to be called fireballs or bolides, with the brightest air bursts known as superbolides. Such meteoroids were originally asteroids and comets of a few to several tens of meters in diameter. This separates them from the much smaller and far more common "shooting stars", that usually burn up quickly upon atmospheric entry.
Antarctic Ross Ice-Shelf Antenna Neutrino Array (ARIANNA) is a proposed detector for ultra-high energy astrophysical neutrinos. It will detect coherent radio Cherenkov emissions from the particle showers produced by neutrinos with energies above about 10^17 eV. ARIANNA will be built on the Ross Ice Shelf just off the coast of Antarctica, where it will eventually cover about 900 km^2 in surface area. There, the ice-water interface below the shelf reflects radio waves, giving ARIANNA sensitivity to downward going neutrinos and improving its sensitivity to horizontally incident neutrinos. ARIANNA detector stations will each contain 4-8 antennas which search for brief pulses of 50 MHz to 1 GHz radio emission from neutrino interactions.
The Chelyabinsk meteor was a superbolide that entered Earth's atmosphere over the southern Ural region in Russia on 15 February 2013 at about 09:20 YEKT. It was caused by an approximately 18 m (59 ft) diameter, 9,100-tonne (10,000-short-ton) near-Earth asteroid that entered the atmosphere at a shallow 18.3 ± 0.4 degree angle with a speed relative to Earth of 19.16 ± 0.15 kilometres per second. The light from the meteor was briefly brighter than the Sun, visible as far as 100 km (60 mi) away. It was observed in a wide area of the region and in neighbouring republics. Some eyewitnesses also reported feeling intense heat from the fireball.
Climate fiction is literature that deals with climate change. Generally speculative in nature but inspired by climate science, works of climate fiction may take place in the world as we know it, in the near future, or in fictional worlds experiencing climate change. The genre frequently includes science fiction and dystopian or utopian themes, imagining the potential futures based on how humanity responds to the impacts of climate change. Climate fiction typically involves anthropogenic climate change and other environmental issues as opposed to weather and disaster more generally. Technologies such as climate engineering or climate adaptation practices often feature prominently in works exploring their impacts on society.