The cessation of the Yrr attacks followed the sinking of the USS Independence and brought a sudden reprieve from a crisis that had reached across the ocean. The signals and ecological changes coincided with Karen Weaver’s encounter with the Yrr Queen, but the account leaves open whether the danger was ended or only suspended.

Signals and the End of the Attacks

Soon after the USS Independence went down, the SOSUS arrays detected Scratch signals audible from one end of the ocean to the other. A few hours later, a rescue squad reached the seamount to free Gerhard Bohrmann from his underwater cave, but the sharks had disappeared. The whales returned to their normal routines overnight; the worms vanished, along with the jellyfish and other toxic creatures, and the coastal crab invasions stopped. The sequence makes the halt feel comprehensive, yet does not explain precisely how the signals, the Yrr, and the retreat of the attacks were connected.

Karen Weaver and the Uncertain Connection

The narrator links the timing of the Scratch signals to Karen Weaver’s encounter with the Yrr Queen, although Karen herself still does not know what she saw at the bottom of the Greenland Sea. A computer aboard the Deepflight recorded when she opened the pod and released Mick Rubin’s body; not long afterward, the terror ceased. That timing gives the encounter and the release a possible significance in the change, but the account presents coincidence, not proof of cause. The pivotal event remains partly inaccessible even to the person who experienced it.

Ecological Reprieve and Its Limits

The attacks’ disappearance was accompanied by a slow restoration of larger ocean systems. The oceanic pump gradually resumed working in time to avert an ice age, and Gerhard Bohrmann reported that the methane hydrates were stabilizing. These changes suggest that the reprieve reached beyond the immediate absence of hostile animals to the environmental processes threatened by the crisis. Yet the account refuses a settled resolution: the cessation may have been temporary, leaving the survival of the reprieve an open question.