Bringing Back the Glow

       For hundreds of years residents of the Northern Hemisphere had romped throughout the summer wearing as little attire as possible in their local lakes and the world's oceans.  

     In 2929, though, the sun left the planet midway through the season and disappeared behind the haunting and oversized shadow of the Earth’s moon.

     Solar eclipses had happened frequently, often more than once a year, several times during our home base’s long history.

    This time though, earthlings had the sickening feeling the cyclical change was turning into a permanent situation that would forever change the world.

   With Mother Nature closing the curtain on 2300, news reports began to surface about nature playing a cruel joke on humanity by having the sun disappear from earth’s skies for more than just a few hours, sending many normally warm areas into an extended deep freeze.  

      Medical personnel working in an increasing number of emergency rooms failed to get the punchline of this cruel celestial joke.   They couldn’t find humor in the fact that severe frostbite cases already had overwhelmed hospitals, and they feared that death-toll records would soon follow.

      Almost overnight, medical facility emergency rooms situated near the world’s normally most torrid zones found themselves overwhelmed by those exposed to the frigid temperatures for as little as five minutes in the middle of  July.

     Scientific data began to mount–the conclusion? This particular eclipse could cause the sun to completely vanish in about a decade.

     The most clear evidence of the climate reversal?  The normally warmest inhabited place on earth--Dallol, Ethiopia, which holds the official record for highest average temperature for any place on Earth. From 1960 to 1966, the annual mean temperature of the locality was 34.4 °C (93.9 °F), while the average daily maximum temperature during the same period was recorded as a scorching 41.1 °C (106.0 °F).  Its daily temperature in mid-summer 2929 had averaged negative 85 degrees Fahrenheit for a solid week.

      The torrid climate began to turn this former center of a large salt-mining operation into a ghost town.

     For many years, due to its similarity in climate and terrain to the planet Mars, scientists had come to depend on it to learn more about the Red Planet to prepare for possible future exploration.

     With the continuing freeze, this vast fountain of knowledge could shortly dry up.

      Because the overall temperature of the entire earth had decreased only one degree every six months the world’s top climate scientists at first seemed unconcerned. As the illnesses and deaths began to pile up they realized that dire consequences could loom for the planet.

       The scientists also saw signs that oceans around the globe soon could flood even the most arid place in the world, the Atacama Desert in Chile, permanently upsetting the fragile balance of nature there and a thriving tourist industry that depended on it.

        International news outlets also revealed that leaders outside of Dallol and Atacama saw the signs mounting most severely in the places on Earth which formerly had provided the greatest amount of heat only in summer dealing with this phenomena year round. 

          As time went by,  those who made their livings in Atacama by introducing the world to some of Chile’s most intriguing treasures such as the Tatio Geysers, at a height above 14,000 feet, soon would not be able to guide expeditions to the nearly water-swamped geothermal field that nearby volcanoes had created. 

      It looked like the huge steam columns that once rose to heights of nearly 40 feet would shortly lay dormant. The Puritama hot springs, once famous for offering relaxing dips in their scenic warm water pools, faced transformation into frozen lakes.

            The solution began to emerge from an unlikely source.

      Researchers in NASA’s Goodard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD had been looking for a safe method of equipping future spacecraft for a possible launch to Uranus—the coldest planet in the solar system. Their research had estimated its surface temperature at negative 224 degrees centigrade.

          They had developed a super high temperature capsule, which they would possibly launch into the atmosphere of Uranus prior to sending an exploratory probe to the planet. They hoped this would sufficiently heat the coldest planet in order to make space exploration there possible.

        The scientists didn’t believe this capsule had yet reached the point where they could use it to address the planet-wide problem on Uranus, but they soon began work in adapting it to the emergency mission of returning the atmosphere to a level safe for the continuing existence of the human race.

        When told about the crucial situation developing around the world, they admitted scientists from around the globe into their research circles, and increased the rapidly accumulating knowledge base while perfecting a vehicle to confront the current urgent situation.

        The emergency also became the perfect testing ground, not only for climate control on Uranus, but also for future missions to expand global understanding of other concepts and discovery about more distant reaches of the universe that they hoped would solve even more of the Earth’s problems.

        They launched a rocket from Goddard at 7 am Eastern Time on August 20, 2029.  To meet the needs of the crisis the team also had sped up the timeline on the development of advances in the speed of travel across the galaxy. This enabled the craft to come within a safe distance of the Sun in only three months, half the previous travel time. It shot the low temperature capsule at the eclipse, and this created sufficient heat to reverse the freezing.

        It took about a month for the intergalactic atmosphere to right itself and the world’s population and institutions to adjust, but things slowly returned to normal.

         The Goddard scientists distributed copies of their discovery to colleagues around the world and the joint effort permanently reversed the effect of the summer, 2029 incident.

      The joint research and resulting advances in technology helped create an unprecedented era of international cooperation that the world had not experienced in decades.