At twenty-five hundred deep-water lengths, the ocean floor was paved with frozen fire.
The deep-sea plain sloped down toward the lips of the true hadal trench, covered in sprawling fields of white, crystal-clear mounds. They looked like dunes of packed snow or bleached animal fat candles rising twenty feet from the black silt, their surfaces webbed with thick colonies of sulfur-yellow tubeworms and semi-clear sea-floor crabs.
They were methane hydrates. Volatile clathrates of methane gas trapped inside crystal-clear lattices of frozen water, held solid only by the staggering weight of four hundred and fifty sea-weights and water heat levels hovering just above freezing.
Beneath the hydrate mounds lay dark, still lakes of hyper-saline salt water. These underwater pools were three times denser than the surrounding sea, sitting motionless in depressions on the seabed with their own oily, waving shorelines. If an unarmored man fell into a salt water pool, he would float on its surface like wood on water, pickled alive by toxic concentrations of dissolved methane and heavy metals.
“Keep your floating lift neutral,” Deep-Diver Ren whispered through the copper drain tube. “Don’t touch the white pillars. That ice is held together by pure pressure. If you chip it with steel or strike it with heat, the crystal lattice dissociates into gas. A cubic foot of hydrate expands into a hundred and sixty cubic feet of vapor in less than a second.”
