“And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea”

“And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea” is the biblical epigraph to Part One, “Anomalies.” By invoking Revelation’s image of the sea and its living creatures under judgment, the novel places its first unexplained signs within an apocalyptic frame. The phrase does not identify the cause of the anomalies; it gives them a scale and a moral charge, making the ocean seem not merely strange but implicated in a reckoning.

Epigraph and opening signs

The epigraph is attributed to Revelation 16:2–5. Its image of a transformed sea, followed by the death of its living creatures, anticipates a story in which marine life and human survival become inseparable. Immediately after the biblical passage, a news report describes a huge unidentified carcass washed onto the coast of Chile. The remains have no detectable skeleton, decompose rapidly, and resemble the gelatinous “globsters” reported from coastlines elsewhere. The shift from scripture to a contemporary news item makes the opening feel suspended between prophetic image and observed anomaly: neither explains the other, but together they establish the sea as a source of signs that ordinary categories cannot settle.

Judgment and human damage to the sea

The epigraph’s language of destruction resonates with the novel’s account of damage already done to marine environments. Oil wells can contaminate areas exceeding twenty square metres, with a third of the affected area barren of life; deep-sea cables disrupt salmon and eel homing and harm larvae. Industrial dumping adds more direct evidence of harm: Haifa Chemicals discharged 60,000 tonnes of toxic sludge in 1999, while fertiliser production in the Gulf of Gabes sent 12,800 tonnes of phosphogypsum into the sea each day. The biblical image of poisoned waters therefore meets a modern record of pollution, though the latter is presented as a human practice rather than an unexplained miracle.

The same record extends beyond contamination to extraction and depletion. Seventy of the 200 most commonly exploited fish species are endangered, even as the number of people earning a living from fishing rose from 13 million in 1970 to 30 million in 1997. Bottom trawling sweeps away ecosystems and deprives marine mammals, seabirds, and other predators of prey. A study simulating manganese-nodule extraction ploughed an eleven-square-kilometre area of seabed four thousand metres down; numerous organisms died, and the region had still not recovered years later. These examples give the epigraph’s apocalyptic force a human context: the threatened sea is not only the setting of strange events but an environment subjected to persistent damage.

Arctic consequences and the reversal of judgment

The novel carries this indictment into the Arctic through Leon Anawak’s recognition that industrial chemicals such as DDT and PCBs travel by wind and current from Asia, North America, and Europe. They accumulate in the fatty tissue of whales, seals, and walruses, then pass to polar bears and people who eat them. Breast milk among Inuit women contains PCB levels twenty times the amount identified as harmful by the World Health Organisation, and Inuit children suffer neurological impairments. The epigraph’s image of poisoned waters thus finds a concrete counterpart in pollutants moving through food chains and across borders.

Anawak’s reflection also reverses the apparent moral direction of the biblical image. He considers how human trust in nature has been betrayed, and how the Arctic wilderness is being poisoned because outsiders fail to understand that wind and water distribute consequences everywhere. Against that history, the thought that something at the ocean’s bottom might have decided to stop the damage turns the epigraph into an unsettled question of judgment: the novel links the possibility of a nonhuman response to an environmental crisis whose causes are already visible in human actions.

The human history behind the warning

The account of Inuit displacement broadens the warning from ecological harm to political and cultural injury. Ottawa called the forced removal of nomadic Inuit from their southern Arctic territory “relocation,” moving them to Resolute and Grise Fjord under claims that the northern hunting grounds were better. The account instead emphasizes that the grounds were worse and that the relocated people were made to wear numbered dog-tags. Earlier, white trappers arriving in the 1920s brought guns that contributed to the decimation of seal and caribou populations; the transition from bows and arrows to guns also altered Inuit hunting. Poverty and outbreaks of polio, tuberculosis, measles, and diphtheria followed, and by the end of the 1950s people were dying of starvation and infectious disease.

The later removal of Inuit for military radar installations continued the pattern: people were transported hundreds of kilometres north without tents, kayaks, canoes, or sleds, to settlements far from caribou trails and summer breeding grounds. The biblical epigraph’s language of judgment consequently sits alongside histories in which human institutions inflict harm while displacing responsibility. Its force comes from that tension: the sea appears as a site of approaching catastrophe, but the novel’s evidence also directs attention to the accumulated consequences of decisions made on land.