An action thriller by Jock Miller


Fossil fuel has an ageless affinity with dinosaurs. To create oil, dinosaurs died.


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The perfect energy storm is sweeping over the United States: Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown has paralyzed nuclear expansion globally, BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill has stalled deep water drilling, Arab oil countries are in turmoil causing doubt about access to future oil, the intensity of hurricanes hitting the Gulf’s oil rigs and refineries has intensified due to global warming, and the nation’s Strategic Oil Supply is riding on empty.

As the energy storm intensifies, the nation’s access to Arab oil, once supplying over sixty percent of our fossil fuel, is being threatened causing people to panic for lack of gas at the pumps, stranding cars across the country and inciting riots.

The U.S. Military is forced to cut back air, land, and sea operations sucking up 58% of every barrel of oil to protect the nation; U.S. commercial airlines are forced to limit flights for lack of jet fuel; and businesses are challenged to power up their factories, and offices as the U.S. Department of Energy desperately tries to provide a balance of electric power from the network of aged power plants and transmission lines that power up the nation.

The United States must find new sources of domestic fossil fuel urgently or face an energy crisis that will plunge the nation into a deep depression worse than 1929.

The energy storm is very real and happening this very moment. But, at the last moment of desperation, the United States discovers the world’s largest fossil fuel deposit found in a remote inaccessible mountain range within Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve surrounding six and a half million acres.

Preventing access to the oil is a colony of living fossil dinosaurs that will protect its territory to the death.

Nobody gets out alive; nobody can identify the predator--until Dr. Kimberly Fulton, Curator of Paleontology at New York’s Museum of Natural History, is flown into the inaccessible area by Scott Chandler, the Marine veteran helicopter pilot who’s the Park’s Manager of Wildlife. All hell breaks loose when Fulton’s teenage son and his girlfriend vanish into the Park.

Will the nation’s military be paralyzed for lack of mobility fuel, and will people across America run out of gas and be stranded, or will the U.S. Military succeed in penetrating this remote mountain range in northwestern Alaska to restore fossil fuel supplies in time to save the nation from the worst energy driven catastrophe in recorded history?

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Ten New Studies Show Impact on Coast

Northern Gannet: Delayed Impact 
A northern gannet gliding above Cape Cod Bay

Photograph by Brian Skerry, National Geographic

A northern gannet coasts on the water. Among the 102 species of birds harmed in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, this long-distance migrating bird, known by the scientific name Morus bassanus, suffered the highest levels of oil damage. New research indicates much greater impact on immature birds than traditional counting methods would suggest, with long-term effects that remain to be seen.

"Seabirds are among the most obvious and immediate indicators of wildlife and environmental damage during marine pollution events," said William Montevecchi  of Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada. He led a study published in Biology Letters, a journal of the Royal Society, that took advantage of advances in tracking technology to focus on the northern gannet, the largest seabird that breeds in the North Atlantic, and the only species of solely Canadian origin to be significantly affected by the spill. Using bird-borne global location sensors (GLS) and satellite tags to assess migration patterns, the researchers concluded the gannet population saw a much higher level of "oiling" than traditional assessment methods—bird "banding" or body counts—would suggest.
The Memorial University scientists extrapolated from GLS and satellite tags that the number of gannets of all age classes that winter in the Gulf of Mexico was 118,633 birds, more than double the number (54,905) estimated by traditional banding techniques.

In addition, the study authors stated that researchers traditionally assess seabird mortality by counting dead and dying animals along coasts, so they see only a fraction of those affected.
Most mature gannets had already returned to their breeding colonies in Canada before the Gulf spill in April, but the study concluded more than 50,000 immature gannets were in the Gulf during the spill and suffered oil-related mortality. The long-term effects of those gannet deaths will not show up until those birds would have reached sexual maturity—at about five or six years of age.

—Barbara Mulligan


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