Christopher Golde

Date:               23rd December 2004                              Location:        Macquarie Island, Antarctica

 

 
             John Chambers looked up from his novel and almost fell backwards off his chair as he slammed the book to the desktop.
   

             “Fuck,” he said under his breath, as he watched the seismological graph going wild on the laptop in front of him. The building was only shaking slightly but his graph was indicating something much bigger.

              He looked at this watch and it was 2.00 am. He grabbed a pen from the desk and scribbled the time down quickly on the bottom of a sheet that looked like he should not be writing on. He also wrote the number ‘8’ which stood for what he was reading from his graph. Eight on the Richter scale was a very big earthquake and the largest he could recall for many years. It was enough to destroy a large city if it was in the wrong place.

              His brick lodgings continued to shake for about another ten seconds then stopped and so did his graph. John was an amateur seismologist and a member of the Australian Antarctic Division stationed on the Island to assist the scientists in monitoring the islands unique wildlife and the world’s largest King Penguin population.

               He listened for a moment, even though he was not sure what he was listening for, then stood and walked over to the door, opened it and stepped outside into the very chilly night air. Although December was technically summer, it rarely felt like summer in this remote and isolated part of the world. Macquarie Island was probably closer to the Antarctic than it was to Australia and cold was the norm. He hadn’t put on a warm jacket as he normally would to go outside, wearing only a long sleeve skivvy and that was not enough to keep out the chill. He embraced himself and walked out to the edge of the porch. He listened but heard nothing. The rest of the camp was quiet, lit only by the generously spaced outside security lighting that skirted around the small outpost.

               He guessed he was the only one that had felt it. He rubbed up and down his arms to fend off some of the cold and turned walking back inside, closing the night air out behind him with a thud of the heavy wooden door. He walked back over to the table and looked at his laptop again. He could see the wild fluctuations and spikes on his graph. He knew it was a huge quake and wondered just how far away it had been.

               ‘Maybe it had been near New Zealand or Australia’s mainland’ he thought. He hoped not. ‘I wonder if I should call someone, it could cause a tsunami or something.’

              He guessed that he was not the only one who saw it. Who would he call anyway, at two in the morning? He sat down and made a few notes, looked at the graph one more time and turned off the table light. “Bed I think,” he said softly to himself.

               He walked towards his bedroom but could not stop thinking about the quake. He may have been an amateur, but he had been studying earthquakes for a long time. Macquarie Island was located right on the edge of Indo-Australian and Pacific tectonic plates. The plates continually moved and their movements created many earthquakes. What he knew it meant this time, as if a massive earthquake happened on this side of the plate, the other side was likely to experience one of the same significance.

              The plate that the massive landmass of Australia was sitting on, moved only millimetres each year, but it moved in an eastward direction, away from where he was now.  He was on the most remote southern edge of this plate, the other side was the hugely populated areas of Eastern Asia. He could not help but think something really bad was about to happen and he just did not know what to do about it.

              He switched off the side table light next to his bed and lay his head down on his pillow. Outside, the usual icy winds whistled through the age-old rafters of his stone lodgings. In the distance he could hear the surf, crashing onto the remote shores of the Arctic island.

              ‘Surely someone would be right on to this,’ he thought, as he closed his eyes, ‘an eight could be a catastrophe if it hit in Asia somewhere.’

 

     Chapter sixty seven

          The Quake

Land to tremble, prodigy killed, monster,

Numberless victims, to die, done,
From the sea mishap will occur,
Proud in death, evil in disguise..

Nostradamus                     Presage 84 1563