Li Tongchen frowned. What stone statues? What Arctic?
He immediately turned on the television and found the news channel, where a report from the Arctic region was playing.
The news described an extremely mysterious and serious natural phenomenon in the Arctic.
A few days ago, an earthquake had occurred beneath the seafloor nearly a hundred nautical miles northwest of the Bering Strait. It had been fairly intense, reaching magnitude seven and even triggering a small tsunami within the Arctic Ocean.
But it was an uninhabited region with barely any islands, and the quake had occurred deep beneath the sea, so it had attracted virtually no attention.
Then today, remote sensing satellites from several major nations suddenly detected an extremely powerful thermal—or rather, energy—signature in the earthquake zone within the Arctic Circle.
At first, they thought it was an undersea heat current caused by a submarine volcanic eruption.
But the area registering the heat signature rapidly expanded, already covering a radius of a hundred kilometers.
Judging from the current peak temperature and affected area, if it truly was a volcanic eruption, it would have to be a supervolcano, one capable of causing a massive ecological disaster.
At the same time, seafloor geological data from that area showed no geological activity at all. The crust was extremely thick and showed no changes, making it obviously not a volcanic eruption.
That was precisely why it drew even more attention.
A large number of oceanographers and geologists had gathered in those waters aboard various research vessels, wanting to find out exactly what had happened.
After all, there had previously been the incident involving the Stone Statue Ruins beneath the Arctic, which had ultimately been razed flat by a lost Supercavitating Nuclear Torpedo. Many people remained extremely wary.
And now was the day the Ice