The hadal sinkhole was an upright deep pit three hundred yards wide. He plunged into the deep crust like an open throat in the sea floor.
Millions of tons of hyper-dense water were being sucked into the deep gap at over seventy knots. That created a total underwater vortex that tore jagged dark rock boulders from the trench walls and crushed them in the swirling down-draft.
The scale of the hadal sinkhole was horrifying to see.
Titus’s four heavy dark metal anchor spikes bit into the dark rock ledge. Then, the entire land-wide fault groaned in protest. Below them, through the swirling black vortex, Arthur could see the glow of raw earth-heat magma plumes venting into the deep pit at minus twenty-three thousand meters. The freezing two-degree ocean met the one-thousand-degree dark rock magma. Then, towering geysers of white-hot overload steam blew up underwater. It sent blast waves through the deep gap that shook the instruments on Toby’s console.
“Titus’s anchor cables are holding at seventy-eight percent load!” Toby shouted, his fingers flying across the strain-gauge tracking data. “The dark rock under the spikes is beginning to crumble! The whole ledge is fracturing!”
“Hold position as long as the cables hold,” Arthur instructed calmly. “Look at the climbing bio-masses on the sonar.”
