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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Dead dolphins in the Gulf raise questions










Dolphin cold case: Investigators say cause of calve die-off may never be known

By Brian Vastag


Scientists have found four more dead baby dolphins on Horn Island in the Mississippi Gulf of Mexico and another on Ono Island off Orange Beach, Ala., adding to the unusually high number of dead dolphins found in the past two months.

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.

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