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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Dwarf seahorses threatened by BP oil spill, deserve protection, environmental group says







By Mark Schleifstein, The Times-Picayune


The dwarf seahorse, which makes its home in seagrass beds along the coastline of Louisiana and other Gulf states, should be given endangered or threatened species status because of threats to its habitat by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its overcollection for the aquarium trade, according to a petition filed today by the Center for Biological Diversity.
dwarf-seahorse.jpgStickpen, Wikimedia Commons websiteDwarf seahorse, hippocampus zosterae, at the Birch Aquarium, San Diego, California, in December 2009.

"Our country's tiniest seahorse is just one of the many victims of ongoing pollution from the Gulf oil spill disaster," said Tierra Curry, conservation biologist at the center. "The dwarf seahorse now needs Endangered Species Act protection to have a fighting chance of survival."

The petition was filed with the Department of Commerce, which oversees Endangered Species Act protection of ocean species through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

While the tiny seahorse was threatened by its overcollection for aquariums and the loss of seagrass beds in Florida and other states prior to last year's oil spill, the effects of the Macondo well's oil and dispersants used to break it up have added to stresses on the species, she said.

"Oil spills like the one nearly a year ago in the Gulf of Mexico exact a long and terrible toll on marine life, especially species like the dwarf seahorse that have already been struggling to survive," Curry said. "These kinds of catastrophic spills will continue to be a threat as long as our country continues to push for more and more offshore drilling."

The dwarf seahorse is the smallest of the four seahorse species found in the United States, and it is the third-smallest seahorse in the world.

Seahorse reproduction is unusual in that it's the male of the species that becomes pregnant. Dwarf seahorses live for only one year.

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