XM Drought

The Niantic Glossary describes XM as "A rare and powerful form of tri-polar energy leaking into our universe from another dimension". Some people, like new agents, may be confused by the word "rare". Just open your scanner somewhere downtown, walk around the portals and hack yourself a pile of power cubes, and if you're lucky maybe a hypercube.

But that wasn't the case just a few years ago.

First of all, the means to store XM - the basic power cube - only invented (or discovered) in late 2012. Before that there was no known way to move around large quantities of XM. I'm guessing that individuals or organizations who know about XM (even if not in that name) well before it's discovery in CERN had some means to storage it. Are they different from the "standard" power cube / hypercube? No way of telling at this moment.

Another crucial event regarding the availability of XM is known as the XM Drought. Early reports track back to 8th of April 2016. It lasted about a month. In that month XM was scarce, almost nothing was leaking through the portal network, just some "background radiation".

It is hard to tell exactly what caused the drought. It is definitely connected to the deployment of the Obsidian Shield - a powerful XM construct. It was done by The Acolyte (Enlightened leader and Roland Jarvis’s successor) after the Obsidian Anomaly in Seattle.

Here's my little theory about it - Imagine you're walking near an enemy portal. You start firing XMPs and your XM bar starts to drop. Automatically, your scanner absorbs the XM around the portal, until there is no more. Your XM bar is still far from full. After 10~15 minutes, the XM is regenerated and your scanner absorbs it all, really quickly, to fill up your XM storage. And so it might look that no XM was there.

I believe that the deployment of the Obsidian Shield emptied a really large XM reservoir. So big that it took about a month of all the XM leeks through the portal network to refill it! The Obsidian Shield was supposed to create a barrier to shield humanity from the N’zeer, this is not your average portal shield, or even an aegis shield! This is an XM construct with planetary proportions, so it make sense it'll need a "planetary power cube".

This raises so many questions -

Where is this reservoir?

How big is it?

Is it a natural phenomena? Man made? Shapers made?

How did the Acolyte managed to tap to it?

What else can be done with all that XM?

I hope my research will help answer some of those.