Athena’s main gravitational effect had been a jolting of the Earth’s rotation, producing a general pattern of north-south fracturing of the crust. (The similar alignment of major preexisting rifts and mountain chains was likewise attributed to the earlier Venus encounters.) The American continent was generally broader, less pinched in the middle, and shortened. To the north, the still-forming ice cap closed the Pacific, bridging to Siberia apparently on top of a plateau formed by the squeezing out of existence of what had been the Bering Strait. Farther south, the Caribbean was a system of swampy lakes with an arm extending up into the former American Midwest, while the Panama isthmus had broadened toward the Pacific. Land west of the San Andreas fault had not sunk into the Pacific as celebrated in the popular mythology of years, but instead hinged outward to become part of a new land area of uplifted seabed fringed by a chain of mountainous overthrust to the west. On the inland side, the Gulf of California had opened and extended, reaching almost to the wastes of ash and cooling lava fields that covered the sites where Seattle and Vancouver had stood. South America too, had broadened west of the Andes, but to the east large tracts of Argentina were submerged, leaving a truncated mountain spine crumbling into a chain of islands.
The Atlantic had changed beyond recognition. In both the northern and southern basins, large portions of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge had risen to become new, elongated islands of almost subcontinental proportions, with smaller groups forming a chain curving eastward around the tip of Africa to the shifted and reforming South Polar ice sheet. Except that the tip of Africa was no longer where it had been before. Like California’s gulf, the Great African Rift had opened into a new arm of ocean cutting north through the Middle East and cleaving Jordan and Syria before curving east to join the Caspian Sea. West of this new arm of ocean, the main body of Africa was pivoting north on huge upswelling lava flows, piling crust and sediment into a coastal mountain chain separated only by narrows from the Mid-Atlantic islands in the south, and in the north forming a mountain barrier below the lakes that were all that was left of the Mediterranean. The eastern side of Africa, meanwhile, had become a jagged peninsula thrusting south from Arabia and bordering an archipelago of new islands extending to a much-elongated India.
Farther east, the western Pacific trench system had propagated southward and cut Australia in two. The western portion, again following the general pattern of north-south shock lines imparted by Athena, was swinging northwest into the Indonesian region to produce an incredible tangle of islands, lakes, land bridges, and channels, while the eastern part seemed to be merging into an area of new southwest Pacific uplift that embraced most of the former island groups and New Zealand.
Although still vastly greater than anything remotely suspected previously, the motions of the new fragmenting and merging tectonic plates were already slowing measurably. It seemed that a new mini-continent was beginning to form in the southwest Pacific, with the west part of Australia destined to become a southern extension of Asia. Elsewhere, the widening of the African rift northward showed signs of meeting another fault opening down from the Siberian coast and dividing the Eurasian land mass to create what might become a new ocean. A number of studies had produced maps of how the face of Earth might evolve over the centuries ahead—all of them highly speculative.
Seeing all this brought back feelings that Keene had experienced in the shuttle above Earth as he watched the false-color radar images change hour by hour, telling their story of cities disappearing beneath mile-high walls of advancing water, nations consumed by infernos of burning air hot enough to melt stone, humans and animals dying in billions. Even now, what else might be happening below the veil of dust and vapor could only be guessed at.
“How low have the probes gone?” he asked finally, forcing his eyes away and looking at the other two. “Are there any signs of survivors?” In his numbness it was the automatic thing to say. He didn’t really think so. Any such news would have been known immediately all over Kronia.