A USA TODAY National Best Seller
From the Gulf of Mexico's warm, shallow waters . . . Six-year-old Paul Haines watches as two older boys dive into a coastal river . . . and don't come up. His mother, Carolyn, a charter boat captain on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, finds herself embroiled in the tragedy to an extent she could never have imagined.
To the deepest parts of the Pacific . . . Carolyn joins with marine biologist Alan Freeman in the hunt for a creature that is terrorizing the waters along the Gulf Coast. But neither of them could have envisioned exactly what kind of danger they are facing.
Terror comes to the surface . . . Yet one man, Admiral Vandiver, does know what this creature is, and how it has come into the shallows. And his secret obsession with it will force him, as well as Paul, Carolyn and Alan, into a race against time . . . and a race toward death.
St. Martin's, $6.50, 0-312-96212-6
CHARLES WILSON ON WHETHER GIANT, DEEP-SEA PREDATORS, THOUGHT EXTINCT FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS, MIGHT ACTUALLY STILL EXIST IN THE DEEP TRENCHES OF THE OCEANS?
AND ARE THEY MOVING TOWARD THE BEACHES?
An article by author Charles Wilson on the facts that led him to write his current National Best Seller, Extinct--a St. Martin's Press paperback original.
"When I embark on writing a novel I always make certain, even though I'm preparing to weave a tale of fiction, that the concept behind the story is such that my readers can become emersed in at least the possibility of what I write maybe actually happening. Wait a minute, you say, is this author trying to tell me that megalodons, the giant prehistoric ancestors of today's great white sharks actually still exist?
Maybe.
Readers of Extinct will notice that a quote on the novel's back cover is from Dr. Dean A. Dunn, a notable marine scientist with doctorates in both Oceanography and Paleontology, and a former shipboard scientist for Glomar Challenger expeditions in the western North Atlantic and the Pacific. Asked by me to proof read Extinct's manuscript to catch any mistakes I might have made in the scientific background of the story, Dr. Dunn wrote back that he not only found no major errors, but also found the story highly entertaining--and "Eminently plausible."
Eminently plausible?
How?
For one, a few years ago a giant megalodon tooth was brought up by a dredge sweeping the top few inches of a deep Pacific Ocean floor. Subsequent tests conducted by laboratories showed the tooth lacked evidence of carbonization, amino-acid racemization, or other obvious fossilization. In plain English, there was no proof the tooth was a fossil tooth. It could have been shed by a megalodon only a few years, or even months before. But of course it could have also been shed a million years before, and the tests, for one reason or another, just unable to determine that.
But something else. The most exciting thing to me about the discovery of the tooth.
There is a phenomenon called "marine snow." In the world's oceans, as decaying animal and plant matter disintegrates and begins to swirl in the currents, it starts a slow descent to the ocean floors--much like tiny snow flakes. According to the currents and water temperatures this slowly falling organic matter, combined with other effects, slowly builds as sediment on the ocean floors. In the particular part of the Pacific where the megalodon tooth was found, the sediment is laid down at a rate of approximately four inches per hundred years. According to which scientists you speak with, the megalodons have been extinct for from one million to a million five hundred thousand years. Even given the shorter period of time, the sediment should have built at such a rate as to have buried the tooth hundreds of feet under the ocean floor--not lying exposed on it or only a few inches under the sand for a dredge to scoop up.
A methane gas release? That's what one scientists told me could have happened. Methane gas, released from hundreds of feet below the ocean floor, pushed the tooth up to the surface of the floor.
Possibly.
But then there are the eyewitness reports. Eyewitness reports? Two of them, one by the crew of a freighter adrift in the Pacific as they repaired a damaged drive shaft to the ship's prop. The crew reported a shark "longer than the freighter" passing under the vessel in broad daylight. The freighter was eighty-five feet long. An oversized whale perhaps? Not with a dorsal fin.
And the second, most verified report; by crews of several fishing boats off New South Wales that reported a giant shark surfacing and swallowing whole large, four-feet-in-diameter, floating lobster pots. The crews' estimates of the sharks size? Widely varying but most put the creature at over a hundred and fifteen feet.
Maybe mass hallucination?
Maybe, though I don't believe it likely that fisherman familiar with the sights and sounds and creatures of the waters they had fished for generations would suddenly began imagining such a sight--certainly not all of the crews seeing the same thing if it weren't there.
Yet even if there really is a group of megalodons still living, why would they now, after hundreds of thousands of years of hiding in the deep ocean trenches, suddenly start emerging?
That is unanswerable with certainty. The same as it is unanswerable with certainty why only a couple of decades ago a great shark known as the Megamouth suddenly rose from the depths where it had never before been seen by man. The first emerged off the Hawaiian Islands in 1976. Enough have now inexplicably risen from the depths for one to have recently been videotaped swimming close to the surface.
And what about the Pacific Six-Gill Shark? In all of recorded history an adult Six-Gill had never been seen by man--until 1966 when they began emerging from the depths that had kept them hidden until that time. And now they have migrated south from where they were first seen off California, have rounded the tip of South America and moved into the Caribbean, and even the Gulf of Mexico.
Why?
What is happening in the deep ocean trenches to cause these movements, deep ocean trenches that since time began have kept basically the same salinity, the same ice-coldness, the same deep almost unimaginable darkness?
Is it something man has done, either knowingly or unknowingly?
One thing is certain, the shallower tops of the waters over the great depths have been effected by man; great fishing fleets pulling nets up to forty miles long and hundreds of feet deep have devastated entire marine food stocks in great areas of the oceans. Predators once known mainly only as deep water predators, sharks like the bronze whaler and the mako have moved nearer the beaches in search of food.
Is there some relation between these predators being forced to move toward the shallows, and maybe their much bigger ancestors, now also starting to move, coming up from the depths, also heading in the direction of the beaches?
It was enough for a story."
©1997, ProMotion, inc.