Polar Shift

Polar Shift is a thriller by Clive Cussler, published in 2005 and part of the sequence featuring Kurt Austin. Austin is an operative for NUMA, the underwater exploration agency, and his opponent in this book is a man who presents himself as an environmentalist.

The premise goes back sixty years, to a Hungarian scientist who discovered how to bring about a shift in the polar ice caps artificially. Such a shift could cause eruptions, earthquakes and changes in climate, and his work vanished, or appeared to, until it became clear that somebody had been keeping it. The scientist's work was assumed to have vanished with him, and the discovery that it had not is what sets the book in motion.

The person who holds it leads an anti-globalisation movement and means to use the technology to give the world's industrialised nations a jolt before reversing it. The flaw in that plan is that no reversal is possible: once the shift starts, there is nothing anyone can do. Austin, Joe Zavala and the NUMA Special Assignments Team have to stop it being started.