In 1965, novelist J. G. Ballard published The Drought, an expanded version of his science fiction novel published a year earlier, The Burning World. With these early novels, Ballard was well under way toward achieving the literary distinction of having a genre named for him: “ballardian” — “dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.”

The story of The Drought is the disappearance of potable water, a consequence of the disappearance of rain. The excerpt quoted below provides a capsule history of the disappearance and an explanation for it: the disruption of the hydrologic cycle caused by a thin “mono-molecular film” on the surface of the oceans. Covered by this film, the oceans no longer provide sufficient evaporation to produce rain on the world’s lands.

The striking thing about Ballard’s dystopian vision is in the details: The ocean film is “a complex of saturated long-chain polymers,” formed from a “brew” of “highly reactive industrial wastes—unwanted petroleum fractions, contaminated catalysts and solvents… mingled with the wastes of atomic power stations and sewage schemes.” Here is not only a vision, but prescience, a glimpse into a world post- British Petroleum’s Deep Horizon well blow-out.

Here is the excerpt [from pp. 33-35, Triad/Panther paperback (1985)]:

The world-wide drought now in its fifth month was the culmination of a series of extended droughts that had taken place with increasing frequency all over the globe during the previous decade. Ten years earlier a critical shortage of world food-stuffs had occurred when the seasonal rainfall expected in a number of important agricultural areas had failed to materialize. One by one, areas as far apart as Saskatchewan and the Loire valley, Kazakhstan and the Madras tea country were turned into arid dust-basins. The following months brought little more than a few inches of rain, and after two years these farmlands were totally devastated. Once their populations had resettled themselves elsewhere, these new deserts were abandoned for good.

The continued appearance of more and more such areas on the map, and the added difficulties of making good the world’s food supplies, led to the first attempts at some form of global weather control. A survey by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization showed that everywhere river levels and water tables were falling. The two-and-a-half million square miles drained by the Amazon had shrunk to less than half this area. Scores of its tributaries had dried up completely, and aerial surveys discovered that much of the former rainforest was already dry and petrified. At Khartoum, in lower Egypt, the White Nile was twenty feet below its mean level ten years earlier and lower outlets were bored in the concrete barrage of the dam at Aswan.

Despite world wide attempts at cloud-seeding, the amounts of rainfall continued to diminish. The seeding operations finally ended when it was obvious that not only was there no rain, but there were no c1ouds. At this point attention switched to the ultimate source of rainfall—the ocean surface. It needed only the briefest scientific examination to show that here were the origins of the drought.

Covering the off-shore waters of the world’s oceans, to a distance of about a thousand miles from the coast, was a thin but resilient mono-molecular film formed from a complex of saturated long-chain polymers, generated within the sea from the vast quantities of industrial wastes discharged into the ocean basins during the previous fifty years. This tough, oxygen-permeable membrane lay on the air—water interface and prevented almost all evaporation of surface water into the air space above. Although the structure of these polymers was quickly identified, no means was found of removing them. The saturated linkages produced in the perfect organic bath of the sea were completely non-reactive, and formed an intact seal broken only when the water was violently disturbed. Fleets of trawlers and naval craft equipped with rotating flails began to ply up and down the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America, and along the sea-boards of Western Europe, but without any long-term effects. Likewise, the removal of the entire surface water provided only a temporary respite—the film quickly replaced itself by lateral extension from the surrounding surface, recharged by precipitation from the reservoir below.

The mechanism of formation of these polymers remained obscure, but millions of tons of highly reactive industrial wastes—unwanted petroleum fractions, contaminated catalysts and solvents—were still being vented into the sea, where they mingled with the wastes of atomic power stations and sewage schemes. Out of this brew the sea had constructed a skin no thicker than a few atoms, but sufficiently strong to devastate the lands it once irrigated.

This act of retribution by the sea had always impressed Ransom by its simple justice. Cetyl alcohol films, had long been used as a means of preventing evaporation from water reservoirs, and nature had merely extended the principle, applying a fractional tilt, at first imperceptible, to the balance of the elements. As if further to tantalize mankind, the billowing cumulus clouds, burdened like madonnas with cool rain, which still formed over the central ocean surfaces, would sail steadily towards the shorelines but always deposit their cargo into the dry unsaturated air above the sealed offshore waters, never on to the crying land.

There are those who will claim the mantle of science to dismiss Ballard’s vision as only fiction. The federal government itself, in partnership with BP, would have us believe the oil volcano (or “spill”) in the Gulf has been capped with no long-term damage to the ocean. Here’s their report, released on August 4, 2010, by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey:

…. burning, skimming and direct recovery from the wellhead removed one quarter (25%) of the oil released from the wellhead. One quarter (25%) of the total oil naturally evaporated or dissolved, and just less than one quarter (24%) was dispersed (either naturally or as a result of operations) as microscopic droplets into Gulf waters. The residual amount — just over one quarter (26%) — is either on or just below the surface as light sheen and weathered tar balls, has washed ashore or been collected from the shore, or is buried in sand and sediments. Oil in the residual and dispersed categories is in the process of being degraded.

Despite this rosy assessment, the report concludes: “… federal scientists remain extremely concerned about the impact of the spill to the Gulf ecosystem. Fully understanding the impacts of this spill on wildlife, habitats, and natural resources in the Gulf region will take time and continued monitoring and research.”

In Ballard’s story, the “full understanding” took about a decade to acquire.

In a sign that others are more attuned to the dystopic possibilities of the blow-out in the Gulf, the report “set off a war of words … among scientists, Gulf Coast residents and political pundits about what to make of the Deepwater Horizon spill and its aftermath,” according to an article in The New York Times.

Meanwhile, further research by other scientists “confirms the existence of a huge plume of dispersed oil deep in the Gulf of Mexico and suggests that it has not broken down rapidly, raising the possibility that it might pose a threat to wildlife for months or even years.” The dispute about the science is ongoing, and at least one observer understands the potential for fiction in scientific reports: Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Energy and Environment subpanel, said during a hearing on the official report, “People want to believe everything is OK, and I think this report and the way it is being discussed is giving many people a false sense of confidence regarding the state of the Gulf.”

Local news reports along the Gulf coast provide additional information contradicting the official report: “a coalition of Gulf community activists, scientists and philanthropists are saying the federal government and BP are misrepresenting the amount of oil left to be cleaned up in the Gulf of Mexico and the safety of eating seafood from the region.”

One long-term Florida resident provides a useful compendium of information on a website wholly devoted to the Gulf oil mess: “What I was seeing in the local and national media barely scratched the surface.”

If you want to take a quick look at the kind of science that is being used to study oil in the oceans — including the variety of assumptions (dare we say “fictions”?) involved — see these documents:

1. The “Ask a Scientist” answer to a nine-year-old student’s question, “Does oil evaporate?“; provided by the Newton Project of the Argonne National Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy:

… the molecules in some kinds of liquids, like oil for example, are rather large and well-tangled up and attached to each other. This means that evaporation, if it occurs at all, is very slow.

2. “Evaporation of Oil Spills,” by M. F. Fingas, Emergencies Science Division, Environmental Technology Division, Environment Canada, submitted to Journal of the American Society of Civil Engineers, 1994:

Although the process of oil evaporation is understood, the application of evaporation equations in spill models is sometimes difficult. This relates to the input data required for the equations. There are only 3 relatively well-used schemes currently employed in models. The most commonly used is that of evaporative exposure as proposed by Stiver and Mackay (1984). Difficulties with the implementation of this model are primarily in terms of input data. Model implementation requires a mass transfer coefficient and a vapour pressure for each oil. These are not routinely measured for oil and must be estimated using other techniques. The second most-commonly used method is that of applying oil fraction-cut data. These methods are applied by using the readily-available distillation curves to estimate parameters for the Mackay equations noted above or in a direct technique. The third most common method is to assume a loss rate which is estimated from oil properties and the presumption that the oil moves linearly or logarithmically to that end point.

A blurb from The New Statesman, reviewing Ballard’s The Drought, is quoted on the front cover of the 1985 paperback edition: “powerfully credible, a compulsive nightmare.”

Indeed.

A statistic from the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: “Approximately 80% of all evaporation is from the oceans, with the remaining 20% coming from inland water and vegetation.”