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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U.S. Investigation Finds BP 'Ultimately Responsible,' Contractors to Blame




A U.S. investigation board blames the worst offshore oil spill in the nation's history on British oil giant BP and also points to BP contractors for contributing to the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

The loss of 11 lives at BP's Macondo oil well in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010, and devastating pollution of the gulf were the result of "poor risk management, last-minute changes to plans, failure to observe and respond to critical indicators, inadequate well control response, and insufficient emergency bridge response training," finds the board's final report.

Response vessels spray water onto the blazing Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, April 21, 2011 (Photo courtesy U.S. Coast Guard)

The final investigative report of the Joint Investigation Team of the U.S. Coast Guard and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, BOEMRE, was released Wednesday.

It concludes that four companies were responsible for the April 20 blowout that killed 11 crewmembers and spilled five million barrels of oil into the gulf over the next 87 days.

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Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2011. All rights reserved.

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Why? Tell Me Why!: Dino Bone Excavation



Montana is rich in dinosaur fossils but paleontologists are picky about what sites they chose to excavate. This week Kasey-Dee Gardner and James Williams find out why.
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US Report Spreads Blame for BP Oil Spill




Content provided by AFP

THE GIST
  • Sub-contractors Halliburton, Transocean, and Cameron are implicated as well as BP for poor management.
  • A top lawmaker said the report should eliminate any "excuses" for passing critical reforms and called for congressional hearings.

A key US government report spreads the blame for the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, citing a bad cement job, poor management by BP and its subcontractors and risky shortcuts.

The findings by the agency that regulates offshore drilling are largely in line with other investigations into the 2010 disaster, but offer the most detailed analysis to date.

The report that came out on Wednesday is expected to influence a criminal investigation being conducted by the US Justice Department and impact fines imposed upon the British energy giant. Regulators said they planned to issue seven new citations based upon the report's conclusions.


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A New Sickle-Clawed Predator from Inner Mongolia





A block containing the partial skeleton of Linhevenator. Abbreviations: ds, dorsal vertebrae; lf, left femur; li, left ischium; lpe, left foot; rh, right humerus; rs, right scapula; sk, skull. From Xu et al., 2011.


What makes Linehvenator particularly unusual are some of the details of its limbs. Compared to other troodontids, Linhevenator had a relatively long shoulder blade, a relatively short and thick humerus, and its second toe was tipped in a specialized, retractable claw like that seen in Troodon but not in some earlier members of the group. This is a curious suite of characteristics. Whereas Linhevenator appears to have had a killing claw similar to that of its dromaeosaurid cousins like Deinonychus, the newly described dinosaur may have had proportionally short and strongly muscled arms. This may hint that Linhevenator was not using its arms to capture prey in the same way as dromaeosaurids or earlier troodontid dinosaurs, even if it did have a specialized killing claw. Instead, Xu and co-authors argue that the dinosaur may have had arms adapted to digging, climbing, or something else entirely, although testing these hypotheses is difficult at present. With any luck, additional discoveries of troodontids will help flesh out what these peculiar dinosaurs were like in life.


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