Sci-Fi Action Book where the Sun is a Pulsar and world has to be "frozen" to survive

Question

I'm reasonably certain I read a hardback copy of this around 2000. It wasn't in first class condition, so it may have been older than that. It was printed in English.

Unfortunately, I only remember the conclusion, which I recall was a sci-fi twist on what up to then was an almost straight up action book with an emphasis on boats, submarines and other aquatic type situations.

In the end, the heroes discovered that the Sun was a pulsar type star and its rotation would bring the high intensity beam (the bit that pulses on a fast spinning version) across the Earth very soon. Luckily an Atlantis type civilization had left behind a device which would "freeze" the earth and everything on it, into some sort of stone form so it would be unaffected by the radiation and then change everyone back unharmed.

I feel confident that the Atlantis device was in the Antarctic and that the bad guys wanted to use it to kill people and didn't know/care about the impeding Armageddon.

Answer 1

Decipher by Stel Pavlou.

A signal is picked up from ancient sites all over the planet. A piece of ultra-hard diamond is found under Anartica's ice sheet, with hieroglyphics that turn out to be letters in all the world's languages, regarding common myths of a destructive power from the sky and a flood, items found in the mythology of all peoples.

The end of the book is a race between a team working to activate the ancient device and save the earth and another team who don't believe the stories and just want to profit off the technology.