An action thriller by Jock Miller
Fossil fuel has an ageless affinity with dinosaurs. To create oil, dinosaurs died.
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.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.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?
Was it the oil?
That's the question of the day as the number of stillborn or dead young dolphin calves washing up on Gulf of Mexico shores continues to rise.
The research team called in to investigate the incident has a disconcerting answer: We might never know.
On Friday, five more dead baby bottlenose dolphins were found in Mississippi and Alabama, pushing to 67 the number of dolphin carcasses tallied since Jan. 1 on beaches from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle. Of those, 35 are so young that they might be spontaneously aborted fetuses, making this "unusual mortality event" even more unusual, though not unprecedented.
But determining the cause of this, or any other, wave of dolphin deaths is a huge challenge.
There are no witnesses to interview.
The whereabouts of the dolphins before they died is unknown.
Any unusual behavior preceding death went unobserved.
And, worst of all for the federally coordinated team investigating the incident, all the carcasses are badly decomposed.
"A lot of the organs are mush, basically," said Blair Muse, who collects reports of beached dolphins in the southeastern United States for the National Marine Fisheries Service. "They are coming ashore decomposed. It may prohibit us from determining the cause unless we get some fresh bodies."
That's bad news for the teams scouring beaches to collect whatever blood and tissue samples they can, the laboratories rushing to analyze those samples and the scientist who will eventually try to piece together the spotty evidence.
Those limitations also explain why the record of determining the cause of mass marine mammal deaths has not been good.
Known to Native Americans as the "Shining Mountains" and the "Backbone of the World", Glacier National Park preserves more than a million acres of forests, alpine meadows, lakes, rugged peaks and glacial-carved valleys in the Northern Rocky Mountains. Its diverse habitats are home to nearly 70 species of mammals including the grizzly bear, wolverine, gray wolf and lynx. Over 270 species of birds visit or reside in the park, including such varied species as harlequin ducks, dippers and golden eagles. The landscape is a hiker's paradise that is traversed by more than 740 miles of maintained trails. Glacier Park's varied climate influences and its location at the headwaters of the Pacific, Atlantic and Hudson Bay drainages have given rise to an incredible variety of plants and animals. http://www.nps.gov/glac/index.htm |
The first glimpse of Louisiana is ominous. Clouds hang low over Lake Pontchartrain, casting inky shadows on the water. It looks, from on high, as if the Macondo well has erupted again, right here, blotching the surface with great slicks of oil.
It is, of course, a chimera. It has been months since BP put an end to the oil spill that fouled the Gulf of Mexico. Of the billions spent on recovering from the disaster, a good many have gone to cleaning things up.
The Gulf Coast, that haven of succulence and sunshine and sand the marketers describe as “sugar,” has spent the fall and winter waging a pitched battle to scrub away the stains of what went wrong.
That they haven't yet fully succeeded is something I won't discover until I find my hands sticky with a tar-like crude so thick even soap won't clean it off.
For now, all I know is this: This is a place thirsty for renewal, a destination eager to show off its new self. I figure I'll explore the coast, venture from Pensacola to Apalachicola, Fla., from Orange Beach to Gulf Shores and Fort Morgan, Ala., and along the coast into New Orleans. And I decide there's only one real way to see this place. I need a motorcycle. The bigger and louder, the better. I need a 400-kilogram Harley-Davidson Ultra Classic.
And so, as the brilliant Florida sunshine burns away the morning fog, I begin to drift east. I turn onto a road marked “Great Florida Birding Trail,” but the hog is so loud, the only birds I see are fighter jets at the numerous air bases along the coast. It doesn't really matter, since it's hard to look up past the brilliant beaches.
This is the image favoured by the marketers – who, depending where you are, call it “The World's Most Beautiful Beaches,” “Pleasure Island” or “The Forgotten Coast.”
Whatever the name, it's hard to exaggerate how much beach there is. Though it is also home to rows of condos and restaurants, sand of just about any flavour is impossible to avoid. There are wild beaches and groomed, populated and deserted.
And, if you start in Mississippi and head east, you will discover a virtually uninterrupted strip of sand that stretches through Alabama and deep into Florida, traversing a coastline of wild dunes and blue herons and pelicans, that continues for well over 500 kilometres. It is a natural phenomenon that begs to be explored, which helps to explain why, two years ago, 4.6 million people came to the relatively short segment of beach around Gulf Shores, Ala., alone.
It also helps to explain why that spill is such an important subject. Last year, as images of oil-spoiled beaches dominated front pages, the Gulf Shores number dropped to 3.6 million.
But that seems like ancient history as I rumble down the Great Birding – or, as I'm experiencing it, Birdless – Trail, along its coast-hugging path. I stop at Deer Lake State Park in Florida, where on the other side of a wooden boardwalk, the gulf beckons. It's early afternoon on a weekday, and the sand is empty. In the distance are condos and gated communities and pubs and clubs. Here, it is quiet. Only footprints sully the beach. The sun has warmed the sand. At home, temperatures are sliding past 20 below. Here, it's well over 20 above.
There is only one thing to do in a situation like this. I grab my phone, call my boss and taunt.
Washington – The United States should begin a direct dialogue with Cuba to promote energy and environmental cooperation and reduce the island's dependence on Venezuela, according to a report released Thursday by the Center for Democracy in the Americas.
The independent, non-profit organization, which advocates for an easing of the U.S. embargo on Cuba, outlined in its 59-page report 10 changes that Washington should adopt to promote energy cooperation with the Communist-ruled island as Havana prepares to start tapping offshore oil deposits.
"After living through the BP spill, we can't maintain the illusion that the embargo will stop Cuba from drilling and must instead adopt policies that protect U.S. economic, environmental, and foreign policy interests," CDA Executive Director Sarah Stephens said.
Citing the U.S. Geological Survey, the CDA said approximately 5 billion barrels of oil and 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas lie beneath the Gulf of Mexico in land belonging to Cuba.
The discovery of commercially viable amounts of oil would transform and provide stability to the Cuban economy and is "likely to significantly alter" the island's relations with oil-rich, leftist-led Venezuela and the rest of Latin America, Asia and other leading energy producing and consuming nations, the report said.
At present, Cuban energy production falls short of daily domestic demand and leaves the island dependent on Venezuela for roughly two-thirds of its energy supply.
The CDA calls the U.S. embargo a Cold War remnant that prohibits U.S. companies from "joining Cuba in efforts to extract its offshore resources" and leaves the United States without a viable action plan in the event of a potential oil spill such as the recent BP oil disaster.
The report, which encourages direct dialogue to ensure protection of the countries' mutual interests, proposes that Washington permit an exchange of scientific information and allow U.S. firms to work with Cuba on "efforts to protect drilling safety."
The CDA also calls on the U.S. Congress to support a bipartisan measure introduced last year by Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) and Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) that would allow U.S. companies "to participate in oil exploration and effective crisis planning with Cuba."
The report comes amid expectation that Cuba will drill 20 wells by the end of 2011, mainly in the area between Havana and Varadero. Exploratory drilling led by foreign companies, meanwhile, will continue with the aim of locating new deposits and ascertaining the full potential of Cuba's offshore Economic Exclusive Zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
Cuba's EEZ covers a 112,000-kilometer (43,243-mile) area that has been divided into 59 blocks; the island's partners in its offshore drilling plans include Spain's Repsol-YPF, Venezuela's PDVSA and Vietnam's PetroVietnam.
Agave, the plant used to make tequila, could someday be filling gas tanks, instead of just getting party-goers tanked on margaritas.
Instead of using the plant to produce firewater, the same fermentation and distillation process could be used to produce ethanol for firing the engines of automobiles, according to research published in a special agave edition of the journal Global Change Biology Bioenergy.
BLOG: Whiskey Biofuel? Only in Scotland
What's more, agave might even benefit from higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and increasing temperatures, according to researchers at the Colegio de Postgraduados en Ciencias Agricolas (Postgraduate College of Agricultural Science) in Texcoco, Mexico and the University of California. Agave can use higher levels of carbon dioxide in the air than many other plants, and it has adaptation to living in the desert.
Agave uses a metabolic technique that greatly reduces water loss. The plant uses a process called crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM). In CAM, a plant stores carbon dioxide absorbed at night, then uses it during photosynthesis in the daytime.
By inhaling carbon dioxide only at night, agave can keep the opening on their leaves, called stomata, closed during the heat of the day. That saves a tremendous amount of water compared to crops like corn, a C4 plant.
The CAM process is also what allows agave to use higher levels of CO2 than crops like wheat, barley, and potatoes, which are known as C3 plants.
Agave could reduce the food vs. fuel debate as well. Agave grows in areas where corn would wither and sugar cane would shrivel. It's adapted to nutrient-poor, arid lands, so growing agave doesn't compete with food and fiber crops. Though the price of agave ethanol fuel will probably never compete with tequila, there is currently an excess of agave production in Mexico that could be used as energy crops, according to Hector Nunez and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
BLOG: Potential Biofuel Cropland Plentiful
Growing perennial grasses, like switchgrass, on marginal land has received attention lately, but even grasses require lots of water compared to agave, according to research cited by Global Change Biology Bioenergy editors.
BLOG: Biofuel Grasslands For the Birds
The researchers note that there are still not many studies on the use of agave as a biofuel source, and that more economic and agricultural analysis is needed. But it sounds like people in the drier regions of the world may someday be raising a toast to the agave for more than its tequila.
IMAGE 1: A margarita (Wikimedia Commons)
IMAGE 2: Blue Agave growing in Tequila, Mexico (Wikimedia Commons)
With hip bones connected to thigh bones and leg bones connected to ankle bones, the Houston Museum of Natural Science's planned football field-size paleontology hall — part of an $85 million expansion set to open in summer 2012 — is an odds-on favorite to become the liveliest boneyard in town.
Denizens of the hall will include favorites such as the menacing Tyrannosaurus rex, the 42-foot-long, 7½-ton Cretaceous period predator, and the birdlike reptile, Quetzalcoatlus northropi, whose skin-covered wings reached a span in excess of 30 feet.
All told, the hall will feature 26 dinosaurs among 61 major mounted skeletons, assistant paleontology director David Temple said. Those exhibits will be complemented by smaller skeletons, a veritable petrified forest, fossils and artistic renderings of prehistoric animals in action.
While the Houston museum's collection may not rival that of New York's American Museum of Natural History, said museum director Joel Bartsch, its presentation arguably will be the nation's most dynamic.
"This will not be old school," he said. "We're not renovating a historic space on the classic idea of displaying skeletons in a row. We're building a new structure. It will have 21st century interactivity."
One of the nation's most popular science museums with approximately half a million school kids passing through its galleries annually, the museum will meld academics with entertainment in an effort to convey how the hall's ancient occupants lived and died.
"All the mounts will be in action," Bartsch said. "Everything will be chasing something; everything will be eating something."
Bartsch said the 200,000-square-foot addition, the seventh expansion of the 102-year-old museum since its current facility opened in the 1960s, will roughly double exhibition space and triple classroom space. The four-story building will include galleries to accommodate traveling exhibits.
Faced with severe space limitations in its current building, the science museum has held much of its collection out of sight in storage. With the new hall's opening, the public for the first time will see the bulk of the museum's 130-specimen Herb and Joan Zuhl petrified wood collection.
Prehistoric skeletons will be hauled from storage to join new acquisitions such as "Willie," a nearly complete Dimetrodon loomisiskeleton currently being excavated by the museum in Texas' Permian Basin. A fearsome Permian period carnivore, the sail-backed animal lived between 280-265 million years ago.
New, too, will be a remarkably well-preserved Triceratops, a three-horned plant-eating dinosaur that lived about 65 million years ago.
The specimen is a double rarity, Temple said. "You see a lot of skulls," he said, but only occasionally is a complete animal found.
Fossils, including a 100-plus-specimen trilobite collection, also will be displayed. Trilobites, ammonites and other invertebrate marine animals will be clustered around video viewing stations screening animated recreations of the ancient creatures scurrying across the ocean floor.
Museum officials described the new paleontology hall as a "paleo safari," but Temple called it a "fight club."
The realistic juxtapositioning of the animals - many poised to eat or be eaten by their display mates - will be the new hall's defining characteristic.
Typical of the displays - augmented by dozens of artistic renderings of prehistoric life - will be the skeletal remains of a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex attempting to raid a Quetzalcoaltus nest. In a diorama accompanying the display, the T rex has succeeded in munching an egg. But, confronted by several of the Late Cretaceous pterosaurs, its ultimate success is anything but assured.
"They creep me out," Temple admitted of the winged lizards, which could scurry across the ground to skewer prey with sharp beaks. The birdlike creatures were excavated from Texas' Big Bend, thought to have been the approximate point of impact of the Yucatan meteor that is believed to have extinguished dinosaur life.
The pterosaurs were named in honor of Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec plumed serpent god, and military aircraft designer John Northrup, who envisioned aircraft that, like the prehistoric animals, lacked tails. Paleontolgists are uncertain if the creatures were capable of flight.
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