On Thick Ice

On Thick Ice

“This moon once had a carbon dioxide atmosphere, thicker than Mars, almost as thick as Londo. But, sometime in the last couple of million years, the climate changed. Don’t know if was a solar cooling, a volcanic shutdown or even an orbit change, but the temperature dropped enough for the entire atmosphere to freeze out. In the noonday sun, some of it sublimates out and makes a thin fog, but the eighty hour night freezes it out again.

“There might have been life here once, though I doubt it was particularly complex. But somebody definitely visited this place before the Great Freeze. The slow erosion of the CO2 ice fields uncovered this installation, abandoned millions of years ago. As usual, we don’t know what the hell it is or who made it or where they went, but we’ll give it a look and see if we can begin to understand.”

- Dr. Drew Nair, Chief Science Officer, AES North America, Hyades Expedition, 2228.