On 3 February, Dr Odette Collis — retired mathematics teacher, volunteer astronomer, and owner of forty-four observation notebooks — pointed her telescope at the Greymoor Highlands and saw something she could not explain. She has seen it every clear night since.

Sunday marked the twenty-eighth consecutive observation. The glow persists: a diffuse, greenish-white band stretching approximately two degrees above the ridgeline, visible between roughly ten o’clock at night and two in the morning. Through a telescope, the faint vertical striations that Collis first noted remain, though she believes — cautiously, with the hedging proper to someone who spent thirty-one years teaching young people the difference between observation and inference — that the central emission point has brightened slightly over the past week.

“I do not wish to overstate it,” Collis said on Sunday evening, her forty-fourth notebook open on the Cartwright Observatory desk beside her. “But the eye learns to calibrate. What I see now is not quite what I saw on the third of February.”

What We Know

Spectroscopic analysis conducted by Collis and Dr Maren Ilkley of the Royal Institute on 26 and 27 February confirmed emission lines consistent with ionised nitrogen and trace sulphur dioxide — a signature that Professor Elara Whitstone, president of the Royal Institute, characterises as “strongly suggestive of a subsurface thermal source.”

In plainer terms: something beneath the Greymoor ridge is hot, and gas is finding its way through fractured rock to the surface. The glow extends along approximately three kilometres of ridgeline, with at least four discrete emission points, all sharing the same spectral profile. This is not four separate phenomena. It is one system.

The glow predates the seismic tremor recorded on 23 February by three weeks. Both appear to be symptoms of the same geothermal process — a process whose extent and implications remain, for now, undefined.

Tomorrow’s Panel

At ten o’clock tomorrow morning, a six-member panel convened by the Royal Institute will gather in the Meridian Lecture Room on Arundel Crescent. Chaired by Whitstone, the panel includes Collis, Ilkley, a seismologist from Bobington Polytechnic, a mining geologist, and Nils Haversten, chairman of the Miners’ Cooperative of Greymoor.

Their mandate is specific: define the scope, methodology, and timeline of a comprehensive geological and geothermal survey of the Greymoor Highlands. The Copper Review Commission’s interim report, released on Saturday, formally mandated such a survey — estimated at 1.2 million florins and four months’ duration. Tomorrow’s panel will translate that mandate into practical terms.

The questions before them are substantial. How deep should the survey probe? Should it include the promising copper deposits at 150 metres and below, or focus on the geothermal system? Can both be addressed simultaneously? And should the Royal Institute establish a permanent monitoring station on the ridge — the first sustained scientific presence on Greymoor since a meteorological outpost was abandoned in the 1950s?

The estimated cost of a monitoring station: 180,000 florins for construction, 45,000 per year for operation.

The Miners’ Concern

Haversten’s presence on the panel is significant. The Miners’ Cooperative operates small-scale copper mines in the Highlands, producing approximately 2,000 tonnes annually. The cooperative has expressed willingness to expand production — Haversten testified at the commission that 3,500 tonnes might be feasible with investment — but the geothermal discovery adds a variable that no one anticipated.

Mining and geothermal venting occupy the same geography. The most promising deep copper deposits, according to Whitstone’s ridge mapping, lie directly beneath the zone of highest emission.

“We need answers before we dig deeper,” Haversten said last week. “The earth has opinions of her own.”

Tomorrow, the panel will begin the slow, methodical work of asking the earth the right questions.