The patches of algae grew.
Humanity ignored them for several years; indeed, only marine biologists studying algae even noticed that a new strain of algae had emerged. Marine ecologists completely missed the boat.
The conquest had begun.
Year 1 saw the proliferation of the sea scum, as the new algae was eventually called by fishermen and cruise ship lines. Year 2 was marked by high quality photographs from orbiting weather satellites, revealing the beginning of a change in the surface of the Pacific Ocean. They went unnoticed by nearly everyone except for a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii. He just thought it looked weird. Year 3 saw the spread of the algae to the Indian and Atlantic oceans, carried there by cargo ships that happened to pick up an external cargo of the gunk. Year 4 saw the Caribbean welcome the new species. Year 5 saw six category five hurricanes hit the Gulf coast. Whether or not the algae had anything to do with that is anybody’s guess.
Year 6 saw the first ecological study include the algae as a footnote on the second to the last page of the report. Year 7 saw the shrimp harvest in the Gulf increase by eleven percent. And Year 8 saw the beginning of drought in the Midwestern United States.
By the end of Year 9, the algae had spread to every body of salt-water except the Caspian and Black Seas. The western Mediterranean, mid-Atlantic and Caribbean particularly enjoyed bumper crops of the spreading algae sheet and oceanographers at Woods Hole and the Gulf Institute of Oceanography in Miami began to experience a nervous tick when they talked about the increase in the water temperature of those areas. Nervous they should have been, but not about the increase in water temperature, because that was only a side-effect of a more interesting and profound change in those ecologies.
By Year 12, the Sahara had quickened its own conquest of Africa, with the desert now spreading southward at a rate three times faster than before. The drought in the Midwestern United States continued and, indeed, intensified. From the Mississippi River to the continental divide, rainfall had dropped by seventy-two percent.
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