Europa Rising

by Peter Miller

[ Sci-fi premise by Pil: ‘A huge egg is discovered beneath the ice cap.’ ]

datafile rcv: solnet>luna4>mauve.relay>banks.relay>nationalgeographic>socrates
x-from: europa18>newbeagle>scienceteam.sv3>phipps
clearance: 7uy8893pl222cgns-encrypt
filetag: phipps/europa/records/3
content type: text/visual/anagraphix
date: sol 23 july 8
to: socrates
from: Gillian Phipps
subject: Europa At Last!

Dear Socrates,

Sorry for the delay in writing. I guess you must know that we’ve been rushed off our collective feet since we’ve been here, and this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down and get my thoughts in order. Even after six days I’m finding it hard to take it all in.

We touched down at about midnight Earth time at Europa 18 which the locals call IceTown for the obvious reasons. It was pretty much pitch black except for the navigation lights as we came in, Jupiter having set by then. IceTown is about a kilometer below the surface, so once the shuttle is in the bay it gets shunted into an elevator and there is a frustrating wait as it’s hooked into the pressure system and dropped down to Level 1. Then there’s several more hours going through UV disinfection and medical before leaving the docks. All very boring, but necessary I guess.

IceTown itself is much bigger than I’d imagined. There are fourteen levels in all, and each level is about half a kilometer in diameter. There are twelve lift systems, four of which are big cargo lifts. Most of Level 1 is the spaceport and docks, as well as a hotel. There’s another area called Level 15 which is not actually in the IceTown complex but five kilometers away, containing the nuclear power plant and the service systems for that. Power is fed to IceTown via about a dozen super-conducting cables.

Europa is bogglingly cold at the surface, about 260° below zero, but the odd thing is that the temperature starts to increase as you go down. The bottom levels of IceTown are in ice that’s really only about 30° below and then not far under that, the oceans begin. As you go deeper, you eventually reach a balmy ten degrees above zero in fact. It’s mostly to do with the enormous tidal forces that Jupiter exerts on Europa, stretching and pulling it like it was made of rubber. The distortion creates immense friction that heats the moon up as a result. If we were on a more or less solid moon the result would be incredible vulcanism and earthquakes – as is in fact exactly the case on Io. Since nearly all of Europa is covered in ocean, though, the main effect is an increase in subsurface temperature. There are stresses on the ice crust, and in the oceans, but the water absorbs a lot of the energy. The main worry is sudden ice fracture, but closer to the north pole there’s a single massive continent which keeps the ice around it relatively stable. The Europa Bases are in the shelf ice on the edge of the land mass.

The other major concern is tidal solitons under the ice, but I’ll tell you more about that later.

The science people (including the hangers-on like me) are mostly on Levels 10 to 14. They’ve put us in relatively nice rooms, better than most Earth or Luna hotels I’ve stayed in. The hot water is hot and there’s plenty of it, and our rooms face out onto a little courtyard with a beautiful Carly Gascoigne ice sculpture. I had thought that I’d be bored with the ice after a while, having in my mind an image of unremitting artificially lit bright whiteness day after day, but it didn’t take me long to realise how many subtle shades of blue, mauve and green frozen water contains. Europan ice also has veins of various minerals that can sometimes shock you with vivid shades of deep red and purple. The walkway between our hotel and the biology lab is streaked with intense deep blue marbelling which is apparently some kind of oxygenated cobalt. A little bacterium called plostrobum feeds off the oxygen and generates a beautiful rippling blue light as a bioluminescent waste product. It is truly enchanting. I tried to take an anagraph of it for you but it doesn’t do it justice <embed:ana.sciencewalk2.1>

We were itching to take our first ocean drop from the moment we unpacked, but we hadn’t counted on the interminable meetings and data updates. The routine seems to be that we spend most of the morning in the labs gossiping with the Long Stay team, and then afternoons prepping experiments. In my case, of course, it’s a matter of interviewing as many people as I can and anagraphing anything that I might be able to use. Most of it should have been auto-uploaded to the NatGraphic archive already, if you want to take a look.

Yesterday we finally got scheduled to go outside. All the excursion bays are located at the bottom of Level 14, which is the interface to the ocean. There are sixteen bays altogether and twelve subs. Level 14 has viewing stations everywhere, great expanses of Bucky Glass that give extraordinary views down into the water. I knew we were going to see megadipteryx and pentasaganides and all the various jellyfish-like organisms but I had no idea that they’d be so close. They literally come near enough to touch (if there was no glass, that is) and I took dozens of anagraphs in a few minutes. I felt like a tourist (which I guess I am, sort of). Here’s some of the best stuff <embed:ana.viewroom.7> It really is quite amazing. The biggest of the megadypteryx comes floating under you and it looks for all the world like you’re flying over some surreal night time cityscape. The scale is just impossible to grasp because of the constantly shifting waves of luminous light. The patterns of light points that you can see in the anagraph rapidly changing colour and brightness are apparently a form of communication. No-one has any idea what it’s all about. There’s a brilliant young guy here named Steven Yin <embed:ana.yin4.1> who’s demonstrated that the amount of information being conveyed is easily as complex as human speech and probably more so by several orders of magnitude. I think I’ll do a complete separate article on him, there’s way too much of interest in his work to just stick it in a sidelink.

Anyway, yesterday’s drop was very exciting for everyone, not just me. The subs can hold six people comfortably and the overhead canopy of each one is made entirely of buckyglass. Once you’re in the water, there is no way you can tell that the glass is there at all, and I embarrassed myself several times by ducking when a flashing jelly zipped toward us. The excursion times for the subs are carefully controlled, and to make the best of them, the trips are fairly long. We were scheduled to be out for eight hours, and we left very early.

It’s a strange feeling to drop away from the IceTown bays and sink down into the Europa ocean. The water is so clear that there is no sensation of it at all, and really it’s like being in a plane at night. The bays recede away from you quickly as you sink, and as soon as the sub is at nominal distance, all the bay lights are extinguished. They do that to minimize the environmental impact of the station – the lights tend to attract large numbers of organisms and the feeling among the Exos is that that’s probably not good for the ecosystem.

Steven Yin came with us on the trip and he told me that he thought that the lights probably came across to the Europan biorganisms like a loud fat person yelling. His theory was that they come to see what all the noise is about.

The thing you realize very quickly though is that is in fact not at all dark. As you go deeper, it gets lighter. The water is full of the most incredible colour changes and lights and flashes and ripples. Even though many of the lifeforms around the base are recognized now, the subs start anagraphing as soon as the base lights go out, and every trip is recorded comprehensively. The pilot of our sub, Vashudha Babur, told me that on every single dive they had found something new.

We dropped for about an hour and I saw so many beautiful things that I just can’t begin to describe them to you. Of course, I anagraphed as much as I could, and all that will be uploaded by now.

I was completely unprepared for what happened as we slowed to our maximum descent though. From down below I could see a cool green light diffusing upwards and we slowly sank into a forest of luminous kelp that flickered with tiny specks of blue and red light. I snapped off anagraphs like a tourist and I think the Exos thought it was very cute. But I could tell that they love to see the reactions on visitor’s faces – it probably reminds them of their first visit. They call the kelp forest Chemmis, after a mythical Egyptian floating island. As far as anyone can tell, the kelp is not attached to anything – we are far too high above the Europan ocean floor for that – so the organisms must be floating. Also, even though everyone refers to it as a ‘kelp forest’ that’s only a convenience. So far no-one knows whether the organism is plant or animal. They do know it is some kind of colony, and that there is some sort of organism-wide communication at work. I saw that as soon as the sub came down lower among the fronds – thousands of blue flashes started around us, and rippled out through the waving green tendrils. It was so beautiful that I just sat there with my mouth open and completely forgot to anagraph any of it. I guess it will all be accessible to us from the sub anagraphs anyway.

What’s really eerie is that the blue flashes always shoot away in washes in the direction that the sub is going to go. Even if the pilots change their minds and head off in a different direction the kelp seems to know that, and the light waves change direction. None of the Exos even wants to hazard a guess as to what’s going on here – it’s a bit too spooky.

Vashudha told me that she doesn’t even bother to plot a course sometimes, she just follows whatever the lights are doing.

Yesterday we set off through the kelp and out the other side, towards what everybody calls The Reef. This is an area about ten kilometres North of IceTown, where the ice shelf projects downward into the water deeper than usual. For some reason this attracts all kinds of creatures in huge numbers. The hypothesis is that micro-organisms like plostrobum, which is widespread through this ice reef, melt out into the relatively warmer water here, and provide a lot of food for those higher up in the food chain. The Reef is a spectacular site. Veins of plostrobum shoot through huge inverted ice spires, lighting them up like upside-down cathedrals. All around these flock Lightning Jellies, eel-like creatures with extraordinary red light patterns, pentasaganides, tiny little transparent ioids, balloon-fish and literally hundreds of other life-forms <embed:ana.reef11.4>. Here’s my favourite shot. That’s my hand in the foreground. I was pointing at something. Sorry about that, but this shot does capture just a fraction of my excitement.

And listen to this <embed:ana.reefmusic3.3>. They are all singing. It’s truly remarkable. Steven thinks that the music corresponds to the visual language in some way. It’s impossible to tell just how, but there are gestalt changes that are quite obviously mirrored in both sound and light. Watch this <embed:reefmusic4.12> See how all the light colours suddenly plunge down into blues and greens and the music tone goes into a sort of minor-ish sounding key. That’s when we turned on the infrared scopes.

It’s all so truly exciting. Who would have thought three decades ago that the discovery of life on another would mean so much life!

The most amazing thing that we found yesterday, though, happened just as we were about to leave to come back to base. There is a part of the reef where huge pieces seem to have been broken off, leaving big jagged areas which are riddled with holes. I mentioned the tidal solitons before, and they are what the Geos think are responsible for causing these huge rifts. No-one has directly experienced a soliton yet, but bots have laid estometers now right through the sub-polar region and several of them have registered what the Geos call Squid-Force solitons.

Even though we have tidal solitons on earth, they really only happen in the deep ocean, and they are of a very different nature to the ones here. For some reason, probably because of the solid ice crust that covers most of Europa’s ocean, the tides are amplified in very peculiar ways. The solitons are the water equivalent of terran earthquakes, and the amount of damage they can cause is extreme. The ice spires on The Reef that have been dislodged are over a kilometre thick, just to give you some idea of the power in these things. IceTown, and the other bases with under-ice access, have been designed with the solitons in mind so they are smooth domes underneath, and they say they would resist Whale-Force solitons. I really don’t want to think of the possibility of Kraken-Force solitons, which the Geos believe exist. I just hope there are no subs down if one of those comes through.

Anyway, we went up and under some of the broken areas to see if there were any ice tunnels big enough for the sub to navigate safely and we found one pretty quickly. I think we were just lucky – Vashudha said that she tried for an hour last dive and couldn’t find anything. What you have to remember is that nothing is dark down here at all. There is so much light that we could see very easily into the ice mass, and it was obvious that this particular cavern was pretty substantial.

Once we were inside, we could see that we could go quite a long way. The tides are not very strong under The Reef, so it didn’t feel at all dangerous, although Vashudha was plainly keeping a close watch on things. Here’s a snap of the main part of the cavern <embed:reefcavern2.1>. All the bluish light is plostrobum and those violet red flashes in the roof are something no-one has seen before. It was quite awe-inspiring.

Further along we came into an area that was quite dark and look at what we found: <embed:egg11.1> They think it’s an egg! Again, the anagraph doesn’t do it justice. It’s about a metre and a half in diameter. It rippled very slightly in the current, so it looks like it’s made of some kind of transparent jelly, and it has millions of tiny moving trails of light inside it. There was a lot of speculation. Geoff Taverner, who is the head Exo, thought it might be megadipteryx but Steven Yin wasn’t convinced. Possibly the strangest thing of all was that when we got close to it, all the music, which pulses strongly everywhere around The Reef, almost stopped. Personally, I was a little frightened, because it was like there was a group mind and they were all shushing as we approached. We circled it several times, not getting any closer than about five or six metres, and the music stayed muted all that time. We anagraphed it from all angles, and then backed off down the cavern. And the music swelled back up as we did.

I can’t tell you how peculiar it felt.

I was talking to Steven about it just now, before I started writing to you, and he said to me that since he’s been here, he has this overwhelming sense that we were somehow expected. And that’s just it, I think he’s exactly right. I think this moon knew we were coming. And yesterday, I think we were meant to see that egg. I can’t explain why, but it was almost like it was being shown to us.

Anyway Socrates, I hope I haven’t waffled on too much. Tomorrow the sub is going out again, but not with me I’m afraid. The science teams want to get some more information on the egg, and I’m considered non-essential personnel. I guess that’s fair enough.

Four weeks to go. When I got this assignment I thought I might get bored. How wrong can a person be?

Take care,

Gill.