Der Schwarm (Frank Schätzing) | Informal Reading Club

German Reading Book Clubs
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3. Mai

Oh wow what was that?!? I thought I had accidentally ended up watching a Roland Emmerich movie… :cold_sweat:

It’s amazing how the author lets the reader build up a relationship to so many people, and then he singlehandedly kills them. In this case, Lund and Stone and this other scientist, I forgot his name. Among quite a few others…

Now to imagine that he wrote this book in 2004, way before the Fukushima tsunami, and way before the more recent developments regarding climate change. I got curious and googled a bit, and I found an article that describes the same thing - that methan hydrate is a thing, and that it can melt if the ocean heats up, and that would not only lead to large amounts of methane (which is a very potent greenhouse gas) in the atmosphere, but it would also lead to the destabilization of the continental flanks, with them collapsing, sliding down to lower areas and introducing tsunamis. :exploding_head:

Methanhydrate « World Ocean Review

This article is from 2010, also later than the book.

Oh, and even the worms are real :exploding_head:
Methanhydrat – Wikipedia

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Don‘t know whether you already know, but the Baumann in the story is based on an actually existing guy, also called Baumann and also working for the Geomar Institute in Kiel. And I don’t think he‘d have allowed to use his name in this way if the book weren’t based on at least some facts.

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Oh that’s interesting! Maybe he helped with the research?

Regarding facts, the whole methane ice and worms living on it thing is real, if Wikipedia is to be trusted :sweat_smile: I had no idea! Just they don’t seem to destroy their environment irl.

Where in the book are you now, by the way? I haven’t made any progress recently :flushed:

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I read the book probably over 15 years ago. Maybe I‘ll re-read it some time in the future.

Btw: those crab invasions also are real. You can find movies on YouTube.

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