Der Schwarm: A Geoscientific Page-Turner

“Is Gerhard Bohrmann a real person?” he asked.

I paused. My musician friend had never previously questioned the existence of my scientific colleagues.

“Ah… Sure. Gas hydrate researcher. German. Think he’s at Bremen University or at...”

“Kiel,” he interrupted. “I’m reading The Swarm.”

I sighed. My German colleagues had begun raving about Der Schwarm in 2004, when Franz Schätzing’s best-selling eco-sci-fi-thriller was first published. I remained uninterested. When it was finally translated into English in April 2006, I still held off. As a marine geophysicist, I didn’t think I’d get much out of a trashy thriller, which I suspected would twist science to suit the plot, even if it did mention my actual colleagues. But when I started getting questions from a Canadian musician, I knew it was time to succumb.

In the book, ocean denizens fight back against an exploitive humanity. First the transient whales (orcas, gray whales and other traveling species) arrive late to their summer grounds off Vancouver Island. And when they do arrive, they attack the whale watchers. Mutated zebra mussels by the thousands block giant rudders, paralyzing the shipping industry. Jellyfish swarm off the coasts of Pacific Rim nations. The Atlantic fares no better. A Parisian gourmet chef’s carefully selected Normandy lobster proves fatal. It explodes, raining neurotoxin around the kitchen and ultimately into the municipal water system. Characters begin to suspect the onslaught of marine disasters all are connected by a mysterious group intelligence beyond any human comprehension, a swarm of creatures dubbed “the Yrr.”

The major global disaster, however, centers on my own research field, gas hydrates. These icelike solids form when methane – from organic matter decaying on the cold, pressurized sea floor – combines with water. Though it sounds like a convoluted process, deposits are abundant all along the world’s continental margins. In fact, they are so common that they may contain twice as much organic carbon as all other sources (oil, gas, coal) combined. If they could be harvested safely, they would be an immense, untapped and cleaner fuel resource.

But extraction is not yet simple or safe. Should the deposits become destabilized, vast quantities of methane – a greenhouse gas – could be released into the atmosphere and speed up the already terrifying pace of climate change. There is also geological and paleoceanographic evidence of huge underwater landslides in the past that triggered tsunamis and possibly were associated with hydrate destabilization. Some researchers have argued that this might have occurred at the “Storegga Slide” off Norway. It’s a theoretically devastating situation, which Schätzing refers to as the “hydrate researcher’s standard litany of doom.”

The hydrate deposit at the chaotic center of The Swarm is indeed located off the Norwegian coast. It also comes complete with its own population of methane ice worms. Methane ice worms are small centipede-like creatures discovered 10 years ago in the Gulf of Mexico – still their only known habitat. In Schätzing’s story, the worms not only show up across the Atlantic, they are also mutated, angry and primed for mass destruction.

It takes real-life scientist Gerhard Bohrmann to uncover the real danger of these vicious worms, and ultimately the true nature of the Yrr. Bohrmann places the worms in a deep-sea simulator, where hydrates in sediment are housed beneath saltwater at high pressure. Unlike the friendly Gulf of Mexico hydrate dwellers, which live symbiotically with methane-eating bacteria, the mutated Norwegian worms have developed teeth with which to dig into the hydrate and deposit their bacterial companions in position to destabilize the entire continental shelf, wreaking global havoc. The gas blow-out described, any hydrate researcher’s nightmare, was chilling. In the end, responsible, mild-mannered Bohrmann plays quite the heroic role, risking his life to save humanity.

Despite the seemingly far-fetched premise, The Swarm contains more science than any novel I have read, not to mention the real-life scientists. Schätzing manages to create his thriller without obviously breaking any laws of physics or chemistry (though I have some doubts about the speed of communication within the swarm itself). He bends the rules of genetics and microbiology, but he does provide the readers with the background needed to understand. He discusses behavioral studies and intelligence tests for marine mammals. He succinctly describes the world’s massive conveyor belt of ocean currents and how saltiness and temperature drive them, helping to regulate climate. Most importantly, he gives a refreshing description of what scientists actually do that I haven’t seen in fiction: What it’s like to do experiments on a boat, what sort of tools we have, why we use them and how we develop explanations of new phenomena.

Apart from the inclusion of so much real science and so many real-life scientists, The Swarm can’t claim much originality. Schätzing alludes to many popular sci-fi and disaster flicks. The international response to the destruction wrought by marine creatures includes a none-too-subtle parody of the current U.S. administration. Characters are consistent, but not exactly deep. This is an entertaining, exciting thriller, not high art. But if you like your thrillers with a side order of current marine science, from biogeochemistry to oceanography, it can’t be beat. Or if you always wanted to know how your friendly neighborhood Earth scientist might respond when the fate of humanity hangs in the balance… this is the book for you. 

I wonder who will play Bohrmann in the movie?