An audio book.
Leigh, from Rotterham, had an aggressive, unpredictable father who controlled water levels until his early death. Her mother's a maths academic. Her sister Helena is in finance. Leigh's Ph.D subject is algae. She's on a research ship when a deep vent appears in the ocean. It seems to repel ships. She dives into it and has a fever, a feeling she wants to dive again.
A new form of rocket propulsion is discovered simultaneously in 3 continents. One of the discovers had a fever. Leigh gets to work for a company planning a space launch. Her job is to design sustainable algae supplies. An asteroid that had been behaving strangely disappears. Voyager 1 sends out signals from long ago. Chapter 14 (part 2, I think) has a dazzling list of images of Earth-based life.
She's in a reserve crew but ends up in a ship. Her mother is ill. The algae they fly with has some DNA from the vent (not Leigh's idea. She doesn't know whose). Leigh guesses it might encourage symbiosis (archaea into eukaryotic). They all black out. When they wake they all have radiation sickness. There's no power and the ship tech doesn't work. They're 2 billion years in the past. The algae are thriving.
It's 2040. Helena has been trying to find out more about her sister's death - lost rather than dead, like missing sailors. The mission's been discredited, the company gone bust. Helena is told that there might be answers on Ascension island (near where they were going to splashdown). She spends 2 weeks there. She finds a building that looks as if it's been prepared for Leigh and the crew. She recalls episodes of her life with her sister.
At the end Leigh is on the ship returning to Earth. It's entirely blue.
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