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“Ever heard of ringwoodite?”

“Ring-wood-ite?” Rudi shook his head “No”

“It’s a crystalline mineral similar to olivine that forms only under intense pressure It’s found deep in the transition zone beneath the uppera diaht to the surface by a volcanic eruption discovered a sawoodite trapped within it To their surprise, the strangea special form of water”

Priya finished for hiwoodite was

present in the mantle and how much of that contained water The teams that worked on it used seisenerators and measured the results over a period of months They discovered that the entire transition zone, one hundred and fifty woodite andwater It’s normally held there under the intense pressure, capped by the rock layers above So like carbonated water in a soda bottle But the Chineseeffort has fractured the rock all the way down to the transition zone, breaking the cap and releasing the pressure”

“And thus releasing the water,” Rudi said, grasping the rest of the arguh the crust under all that pressure That would explain the field of geysers we’ve seen And it et I’lum, I don’t consider this bad news at all”

“Perhaps you should,” Henley said “This isn’t an oil well that can be capped or even an underground lake that will spew forth for a while and then dry up The transition zone contains a vast amount of water An almost unfathomable amount—to use a nautical term”

“I need nu about?”

“Three or four times the amount in all the world’s oceans, rivers, lakes and ice caps combined If it all came to the surface, the landed This would be a water-covered planet, a shile island Even the tip of Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth, would be subed beneath twelve thousand feet of water”

Rudi didn’t react to the stateiven to predictions of destruction—all part of his Hamlet-like nature But the man was a first-rate scientist He didn’t twist the numbers, he just tended to focus on the worst possible outcome

Priya, on the other hand, was the eternal optis were never as bad as they looked and that nothing couldn’t be overcome Rudi turned her way “How likely is that to happen?”

“Highly unlikely,” Priya said with a glance toward Henley “But if just five percent of the water trapped inside the transition layer is forced to the surfacesea levels will rise by two thousand feet”

“Two thousand feet?” Rudi said

Priya nodded

“And how likely is a five percent discharge from this layer of rock?”