The Deluge by Stephen Markley EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Full Book Name: The Deluge
- Author Name: Stephen Markley
- Book Genre: Fiction
- ISBN #
- Edition Language: English
- Date of Publication: January 10, 2023
- File Format: PDF / EPUB
- PDF / EPUB File Size: 24 MB
THE PHASE TRANSITIONS OF
METHANE HYDRATES
2013
One of the grad assistants had left the mail in a pile by the lab’s primary
computer. The first envelope Tony Pietrus opened was a confirmation letter
from the American Geophysical Union for an appearance at the annual AGU
conference to present initial research findings. The second envelope would
change the way Tony felt about the world. He never got around to the rest of the
day’s mail.
He opened this letter with his eyes diverted, still on the screen, lunch settling
in his stomach and his dad’s advice—“Grants can’t read denser than the actual
science”—still irritating him. He’d often do his best thinking when he let his
mind go, perhaps while playing with his daughters or after making love to Gail,
so he tried to grasp the gist of this latest round of data without diving too deeply
into the morass.
Reading over the cluttered integers cross-stitched onto the
screen, he found himself compelled by the data set the way his kids might
anticipate a lesser holiday, like Easter, and he couldn’t resist a peak at the
chocolate eggs. The issue of his dwindling NSF funds and failure, thus far, to
secure another grant also nagged at him. As if competing for money, lab space,
and computational resources at Scripps wasn’t already pain enough in the ass, he
and Niko had no “charismatic megafauna” involved. Only the maddening
mystery of methane hydrate phase transitions.
To him, the obviousness of studying deep-sea methane molecules felt like a
bright red elephant walking down La Jolla Shores Drive, but explaining it to the
layperson required a convoluted story, especially as to why hydrates deserved to
take money from vanishing schools of tuna or adorable chirping dolphins. It
began with the model his eyes crept over now:
He and his fellow researcher,
Niko, had concocted a Monte Carlo simulation to predict the behavior of
clathrates under changing conditions of temperature and pressure. He and Niko
spent so much time in the lab playing with the input parameters that they
sometimes forgot this could all sound unbearably tedious and impossible to
grasp. Gail lent her more poetic mind to the task of making the clathrates’ story
cogent.
“So you’re trying to figure out when some ice will melt,” Gail said at dinner
the night before.
“I’m bored,” groused their youngest daughter, Catherine, while smushing her
face in her hands. “Stop talking about this.”
“Ah. ‘Ice.’ Yes, very funny.” He stabbed at Gail’s chicken. “You’re more of an
a-hole than the porpoise folks dropping a few hundred grand on new sonar
equipment to measure dolphin clicks.”
“I know what that word means, Daddy,” Holly scolded.
In between his daughters’ complaints, Gail helped talk him through a more
“user-friendly” description of molecular interactions, specifically the ones that
governed phase transitions. Warmer temperatures were one variable that could
trigger the abrupt transition from ordered to disordered states: solid to liquid,
liquid to gas. The Monte Carlo method—so named for its resemblance to
random dice rolls—allowed scientists, economists, and mathematicians to
perform all kinds of experiments to model natural phenomena that have
irregular and unpredictable inputs.
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