A fish that makes tunnels by eating some rock, a thoroughly uninteresting concept with only a single note to add anything of interest.
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I always love an SCP that has an effect involving environmental disaster. +1 for being realistically and well written.
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!
The tunnels are already full of seawater, aren't they? Then wouldn't a large-scale collapse of land into them cause a rise in sea level? Archimedes' principle sort of thing: if you put extra stuff in water, e.g. half of North America, it displaces water causing the level to rise, doesn't it?
And another thing: why are they kept secret by the Foundation? The only vaguely anomalous thing seems to me that they can eat lots of rocks, which doesn't seem too far beyond Mother Nature's capabilities, and surely the threat of continental collapse is something humankind should be warned about (especially given that they'll find out anyway within the next █00 years).
EDIT: And something else: the “Gold Zone” is mentioned a lot in the Containment Procedures, but the article really doesn't say where it is until the Level-4-classified memo. If I were a mere Level-3½ security officer I'd be rather worried.
The drop in sea level is caused by the fact that billions of liters of seawater are going to be displaced into the newly below-sea-level regions of North America after the collapse occurs.
As for warning humankind about the threat of continental collapse, the Foundation likely doubts (and rightly so) that the civilian world would do anything about it. Consider global warming, which is a real phenomenon potentially more dangerous to mankind in the long run than this imaginary threat - there are large swaths of the political world, industry, and media that refuse to believe it exists at all, and even those who accept it as real lack the political will or the gravitas to do anything about it. If the Foundation leaked the news that the Pacific Northwest was going to collapse into the ocean sometime this millennium, most people would probably not believe it anyway, and of those who did, most would write it off as a problem for future generations to worry about.
EDIT: Good point on the Gold Zone. Fixed.
We as a species are pretty good at killing, we can kill these fish and maybe even fill in the tunnels, we can't kill greenhouse gases.
Most of the aquatic species mankind has wiped out/nearly wiped out are as a result of overfishing. The situation with the tunnelfish is the opposite - not only do we not fish for them, we have fished for the species that prey on them, thereby destroying the natural checks on their population.
That's not what I meant, what I'm saying is is that if the news and everyone was alerted to these fish that we could just go in and kill them off, perhaps repair some damage or at least fill in the tunnels. These fish aren't anymore abnormal than their close relatives (aside from eating rocks) so I assume we can just kill them as easily as we kill anything else.
I really don't think "filling in their tunnels" would be that easy with real-world technology. It took months for BP to seal the Deepwater Horizon oil gusher using state-of-the-art technology, and that was just the matter of plugging a hole less than a few meters wide - and which is STILL seeping oil to this day in spite of the fact that it doesn't have tens of thousands of lithivorous fish chewing on it. Filling in an entire tunnel, hundreds of kilometers long, and underwater, would be an undertaking on par with putting a man on the moon.
To be fair the BP fiasco was an astronomical blunder, back to the fish it's a damn good thing we did put a man on the moon, it didn't take us 100+ years either (unless I'm remembering it wrong.)
Would it be a challenge? Sure, but we could handle it before things get critical and keeping the problem a secret when it affects the global populace is an idiotic choice. Who cares if the politicians start squabbling? We would still have Foundation resources working on the problem and we'd get some support from the international community.
Risking exposure of the Foundation's existence is not something the O5s are willing to consider when precedent indicates that a major party in the nation at greatest threat from the collapse is more likely than not to claim that the threat doesn't exist at all.
As far as putting a man on the Moon - it took a little over 300 years from when Cyrano de Bergerac first proposed sending a man to the Moon on a rocket, to when it actually happened for real. :)
I'd love to see how they would disprove the existence of billions of fish and tunnels that are "hundreds of kilometers long".
Pretty much the same way they "disprove" the existence of global warming, evolution, abiogenesis, and the Big Bang, I'd suspect - by appealing to people's "common sense" and idealogical forepinnings rather than the science of it.
You keep going back to Global Warming but the two aren't comparable, one is a semi-debated theory about man-made gases screwing with the world while these are fish. We could catch a couple and throw them at peoples faces, record them eating rock, explore the created tunnels, and just in general physically prove they exist beyond any reasonable doubt.
Creationists are morons and are pretty laughable in general, no one respects their opinion but religious heavy states and backwater cousin kissers, they don't apply in this situation.
Don't they? Politics operates in a world where science and evidence aren't nearly as important as emotions and gut feelings. That's why the Foundation operates apart from and independent of government - because a government as divided, conservative, and slow to act as ours isn't going to be able to render any meaningful assistance even in the face of blatant evidence that a major chunk of the nation is in danger of annihilation because of an entity that shouldn't logically exist.
because of an entity that shouldn't logically exist.
I'd agree if these weren't fish, maybe fish made of lava or dragons made of interstellar radiation, but they're fish with no astounding or insane properties aside from eating rocks. These are pretty much the most mundane SCP ever created and if they actually existed I wouldn't be all that surprised.
Don't they? Politics operates in a world where science and evidence aren't nearly as important as emotions and gut feelings.
I agree to an extent, some things aren't given their due respect because the big businesses can buy opinions/votes. There really wouldn't be any reason not to consider or believe that these fish exist, is there a big corporation out there that is heavily invested in the survival of the rock munchers? The most opposition I could see against killing these fish would be the wildlife hippy crowds (who have very little political pull) and even then their opinion is trumped by the threat to american life.
they're fish with no astounding or insane properties aside from eating rocks.
Name a species of animal capable of digesting rocks.
There really wouldn't be any reason not to consider or believe that these fish exist, is there a big corporation out there that is heavily invested in the survival of the rock munchers? The most opposition I could see against killing these fish would be the wildlife hippy crowds
The primary means by which we hope to limit their population at the time is by restricting whaling and fishing for the animals that feed on the tunnelfish. Any restriction on free market enterprise is certain to run afoul of numerous big corporations and their allies on the political right.
I can't, that's their anomalous property, but as I said I wouldn't be all that surprised if they uncovered a species capable of doing just that. I'd probably shrug and say "neat" when someone told me about them because it's not that crazy.
The primary means by which we hope to limit their population at the time is by restricting whaling and fishing for the animals that feed on the tunnelfish. Any restriction on free market enterprise is certain to run afoul of numerous big corporations and their allies on the political right.
Our big plan isn't to go down and kill the fish or pump filler into the tunnels (I'm sure we have various assets at our disposal that would make either task easier) but to say "hey, stop that" to fishermen.
Again I repeat: Who would oppose the decimation of the country sinking fish? No one is making a market from keeping the fish alive and no one would lose their business from killing off these fish.
You know, there's actually an almost extinct breed of snail that eats rock, but there's less than a hundred of them left in the world that we know about.
Again I repeat: Who would oppose the decimation of the country sinking fish? No one is making a market from keeping the fish alive and no one would lose their business from killing off these fish.
The people making a market off of the fish that eat those fish, and whose bottom line would be affected by not being able to fish for them.
Moreover, killing off one specific species of fish is a much more difficult proposition than you suggest. We could start just dumping millions of liters of anti-fish poison into the ocean, and turn the entire northern Pacific into a dead zone. Would that be a good idea? Of course not.
Surely we could produce a tailored poison/explosive and drop it down to them, like that river that they poisoned to kill off the invasive species present (admittedly they fucked up and it was a bad idea but I think we could do a better job with our resources.)
Plus if we make a mistake we could just deliberately collapse the tunnels and pull a "marianas trench"-style reboot.
Personal canon, Boa. Both of those things involve the Foundation throwing away its cover for something that probably won't even work, and I like to think that Smapti's set this in a bleaker world where there's no escape if something happens.
I'm still not sure about the sea level thing. Almost all of North America is above sea level at the moment, isn't it? So when it collapses downwards, surely there won't be anywhere for the water displaced from the tunnels to go but upwards. Whether this water flows inland in a flood or stays at sea, isn't it going to be higher than it was?
The volume of the water displaced from the tunnels isn't nearly equivalent to the area of land that's ending up underwater, though, and the solid material now occupies less volume due to the massive seismic effects exhibited during the collapse. I'll admit to not being a geologist or a mathemetician, but the root idea of it is that the world's oceans cover a larger surface area post-collapse than they did previously - and as such, the global sea level drops.
I, too, have no real background in geology. But logically, as far as I can see, the volume of earth that moves downward, decreasing its elevation and letting water cover the area above it, would be exactly equivalent to the volume of water within the tunnels that is pushed out. I mean, I can see some settling by the earth falling into the vacuum of the tunnels, but that doesn't make there be more floodable area. And I really can't see a double-digit decrease in global sea levels as a result. Again, my mileage may vary.
You're comparing area to volume. Comparing volume to volume makes it clear that the collapse could only possibly cause a rise in sea level (or it staying constant) as you're moving material that's above sea level under the water.
Note that a rise in sea level is likely to be far more damaging than a drop, so it's not like it makes the SCP less of a threat.
Saw this over on IRC and liked it - have upvoted. As mentioned you would need a pretty huge population of the things to even make a dent in the natural erosion stats, but it's written well enough that I could suspend disbelief :)
1) I have a hard time believing that enough rock could have been eaten by these fish since 1850 to cause a problem. Did you do any calculations on the number of fish and the amount of rock involved to determine if it was feasible?
2) Unless most of what the stone that they eat just vanishes, these fish are going to produce as waste "slag" which has almost equal volume to the rock they eat. This would have multiple problems:
a) If the fish crapped in the tunnels they'd block off the tunnels they were making, so they'll have to make round trips to the tunnel entrance to crap. This will limit the length of the tunnels they can make.
b) Considering the huge amounts of rock they eat, they'd create huge piles of slag-crap outside the tunnel entrances. If the piles got high enough they'd threaten to collapse and bury the tunnel entrances, so each year the fish will have to go further and further from the tunnel entrance to take a crap.
c) The vast piles of slag-crap would be noticed by scientists.
SCP-1238 is not suitable for human consumption due to the large concentrations of toxic minerals consumed by the fish, and are not currently fished for in any significant quantity or exploited by human industry for any significant purpose.
This sounds like a species that the general scientific community would be aware of. Further, they'd be trying to figure out what in their diet caused them to have such high concentrations of various poisonous metals in their bodies.
Upvoted for cool: I like the idea of a very for-want-of-a-nail-style SCP, where a small anomaly ("hey, this fish eats rock!") leads to an enormous counterpoint ("hey, Seattle's missing!")
That said, a couple of points:
1. I understand the out-of-universe reason for redacting so many of the numbers in the last addendum (making the effects mysterious but still scary), but there isn't an in-universe reason for hiding any of that information if it were available. The depth to which the Gold Zone would be flooded (triple-digits, though? really?), the extent of the subsequent drop in global sea levels (which I'm still not sure would happen; see above), the projected casualty count, the area of the Gold Zone; all of this is really, really important information, and if an inter-O5 memo is going to be included in a containment document, it would need to include that data.
Also, this is an interactive map details the effects of a global rise in sea level by 60 meters. I know it's not the scenario we're talking about here, but it's still a bit different. Additionally, this is a map that lets you zoom in on a location (like the Pacific Northwest) and check elevation at different points. A lot of the area you have in the Gold Zone actually has a pretty high elevation; the smallest I saw in the Montana/Washington/Idaho/Oregon part was around 300m, and got up to 1200m in a few places. The Imperial Valley, sure. But unless the fish are carving out tunnels that are 1.2km wide, it's hard to figure out the exact placement of the Gold Zone.
2. Just a question. The fish eat rock. What are they pooping? Logically, the rock removed from beneath the Pacific Northwest is being deposited somewhere, Andy Dufresne-style.
3. Given that the Foundation has known about this for at least a couple of decades, is there a specific reason why they can't begin a more…informal evacuation of the Gold Zone? Arrange for the cultural artifacts to be relocated under various pretenses? Carry out some terrorist attacks or fake some nuclear meltdowns to discourage human settlement in the area? Just something a little more proactive than "let's wait for shit to go down"?
4. Aren't there other ways of killing these things en masse? Poisoning the rock? Poisoning or fishing to extinction their other food sources? Just slaughtering them for reasons other than food production? We might not fish for them under normal circumstances, but if they're destroying the land we live on, I'm sure we can find a way to make them extinct.
I still like it, but I had some thoughts.
3. Given that the Foundation has known about this for at least a couple of decades, is there a specific reason why they can't begin a more…informal evacuation of the Gold Zone? Arrange for the cultural artifacts to be relocated under various pretenses? Carry out some terrorist attacks or fake some nuclear meltdowns to discourage human settlement in the area? Just something a little more proactive than "let's wait for shit to go down"?
The Foundation is subtly trying to do so by encouraging the development of a "green" culture that will have a minimal economic impact if it's destroyed, but considering how big the Gold Zone is, and how many people live there, even announcing to the public that they're living on borrowed time wouldn't result in mass relocation. In the real-world northwest, an eruption of Mt. Rainier (which last happened only about 300 years ago and could feasibly happen again this century) will bury thousands of people's homes under dozens of feet of mud, completely sever north-south travel through the Puget Sound region, and force the relocation of probably half a million people. This is a real threat that people are aware of - but despite putting up some warning sirens and a few "Volcano Evacuation Route" signs, it hasn't halted development and population growth in the region. For that matter, if Yellowstone were to erupt, pretty much the entire western US would choke to death on toxic gas, and the impact to civilization would probably be greater than what i've proposed in this SCP, but it hasn't stopped the west coast cities from growing larger and larger.
Sampti, Eskobar's comments got me thinking and made me downvote this.
While a rock-eating fish is plausible, undermining the western seaboard of the United States to the extent that a sudden seismic event would cause the catastrophic collapse presented here is not.
Another thing: seismologists look at how various seismic waves travel through rock to learn things about geology. I'm not a geologist/seismologist, but I think that if enough rock was eaten away that it could cause a collapse like that, it would affect the passage of seismic waves, which means that the readouts of seismographs would have to be doctored to prevent the public from learning about it.
I can see why this is a foundation matter, despite not being particularly supernatural: If the world knew this was coming, it would cause mass panic. It's not massively anomalous, but it does warrant a coverup to some extent.
However, I'd like to see the foundation doing something more pro-active. Closing up the tunnels is helpful, but not very; the fish will make a new lot elsewhere. Make the tunnels more subtly deadly to the fish, so they come into their ancestral tunnel, and then die. Maybe even stock the tunnels with some of their predators.
Would losing that area really have the potential to escalate to a collapse-of-civilization event? I mean, it'd be a massive disaster/tragedy and a bitch and a half to deal with, but I don't get the feeling that it'll snowball into the collapse of civilization.
if your reading this your gay
Actually, I might argue that yes, it would. The loss of huge swaths of California farmland is one significant point, but here's the more sobering thought for those of us here present: we'd also be losing San Jose, San Francisco, Paolo Alto, Mountainview, and Seattle in one fell swoop. That's the headquarters of Apple, Microsoft, HP, Google, Amazon, along with hundreds of other tech companies, with all of their servers, resources, and manpower, completely wiped off the map. Several major international airports would be completely gone, and since the traveling-salesman problem is NP-complete and bureaucracies are asnine, I have to imagine it would take ages before air travel recovered enough to be functional through much of the western seaboard. The entertainment industry is fairly well invested up here as well- say goodbye to Pixar, (Dreamworks?), and enough soundstages and the like to leave gaping holes in the TV and Movie lineup. These are just what I can think of off the top of my head.
To summarize some of these specific examples: the economy is going to tank, food prices are going to skyrocket due to the shortage, entertainment is going to be scarce, and to top it all off we'll have blown a hole in the internet the size of Texas. Add that to anything I'm overlooking, and once they get over the initial shock, PEOPLE ARE GOING TO FREAK.
Fair enough. And now I feel a bit less safe knowing how much of our civilization's resources are in a relatively small area like that.
if your reading this your gay
Fair enough. And now I feel a bit less safe knowing how much of our civilization's resources are in a relatively small area like that.
Here's an article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaregions_of_the_United_States
Want to see it on a map? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/MapofEmergingUSMegaregions.png
Those are the areas of the US you need to destroy to really fuck shit up. Any one of them would do.
And they're not exactly large.
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page revision: 2, last edited: 15 Jan 2023 15:06
