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.
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?
Refining towers at the Zawiya oil refinery near Tripoli, Libya.
BRUSSELS — Opportunities in oil and natural gas have rarely been so bountiful. New finds and technological advances and fresh access to some countries are pushing exploration and production into areas once considered peripheral.
Some of the most promising new fields are in deep water off the coast of Brazil. Experts say they could yield as much oil as the North Sea. There have been significant strikes off the coast of French Guiana, north of Brazil, and off Ghana in West Africa.
Iraq is opening up after years of sanctions and war. It could be a second Saudi Arabia.
Russia is increasing production in its Arctic regions, while Canada is steadily producing more oil from its abundant tar sands.
In the United States, the vast deposits of natural gas found in shale rock could transform the country into a major energy exporter.
Those prospects “will certainly have significant impacts on the energy map,” said Maria van der Hoeven, the newly appointed executive director of the International Energy Agency, which advises member countries, including Germany, Japan and the United States, on energy policy.
The prospects are coming into view as revolution and instability threaten new investments in resource-rich countries like Libya and Iraq and after a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan that prompted Germany to declare it would phase out nuclear technology.
Fewer reactors should drastically increase demand for electricity from natural gas, while lower-than-expected growth in energy exports from the Middle East and North Africa could “radically alter the global energy balance,” Ms. van der Hoeven said.
Yet the new opportunities also present companies and investors with a dizzying array of risks — including the high cost of development and exploitation and the possibility that energy prices could fall, especially if the global economy slows drastically and energy demand slackens.
One year after President Obama established the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Task Force, the group issued its strategy for reversing the decline of the region's ecosystem.
The Task Force says its preliminary report is the first formal agreement on what the priorities should be for coastal restoration.
The Task Force includes representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well as the five Gulf States and 10 other federal agencies. They held over 40 public hearings before preparing this plan.
Even before the disastrous BP oil spill last year, "The Gulf of Mexico endured decades of decline that threatened the environmental and economic health of this region," says EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. "This strategy is designed to prepare the region for transitioning from a response to the spill into a long-term recovery that supports the vital ecosystem and the people who depend on it."
"The report attempts to begin reversing 80 years of mismanagement," says Garret Graves, Task Force vice-chair and chair of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana. "It identifies critical issues such as changes in river management, the use of dredged sediment, navigation channel bank stabilization, and the need to expedite the snail's pace process of implementing water resources projects. History has proven that being reactive on disaster mitigation costs exponentially more. This report is an important first step in moving toward a proactive strategy as recognized through the implementation of the state's coastal master plan."
The report's major recommendations are:
1. Restore and conserve habitat - Stop the loss of critical wetlands, sand barriers and beaches, and key habitats for a wide range of fish and other animals.
Creating channels and levees from dredging the lower Mississippi has disconnected the vast wetland delta from the source of sediments that built it over thousands of years.
The plan is to restore that sediment supply so that it can build up eroded wetlands and ultimately reconnect them to their historic source of sediments.
To help do this, the strategy recommends prioritizing ecosystem restoration by ensuring that social, environmental and economic outcomes are fully considered in all river management decisions. It should be placed on equal footing with other priorities such as navigation and flood damage risk reduction.
They also recommend expanding conservation areas in addition to restoring and conserving coastal and near-shore habitats.
2. Restore Water Quality such as Nutrient Flow into the Gulf.
The "Dead Zone" in the Gulf - the largest hypoxic zone in the US and second-largest in the world - is caused by the input of excess nutrient pollution to the Gulf, most of which comes from upstream from states along the Mississippi River.
Nitrogen fertilizer from crops needs to be controlled, for example, as it travels down the Mississippi River and ends up in the Gulf.
It will be a challenge to address this since there are so many states involved. They aslo recommend collaborating with Mexico to assess and reduce emissions from oceangoing vessels in the Gulf that degrade water quality.
3. Enhance Resiliency Among Coastal Communities
The task force proposes to work with each Gulf state to build greater integrated capacity through effective coastal improvement plans, such as community planning, risk assessment and smart growth implementation.
The Task Force will begin immediately reviewing existing policies, programs and regulations that are slowing down restoration progress, particularly in habitat restoration. They will also find ways to get restoration efforts going and to measure success.
Unfortunately, the recommendations come at a time of severe fiscal restraint and resistance to to implementing large projects, many of which are necessary to revive the Gulf.
President Obama called for the creation of the task force after Ray Mabus, Secretary of the Navy, submitted a report on the Gulf's health after the three-month BP oil spill. Under the president's plan, a permanent council will implement the task force's strategy along with relevant federal and state agencies, and nonprofits.
Funding will largely come from Clean Water Act civil penalties resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A bill is winding its way through the Senate to direct four-fifths of the spill penalties to coastal restoration, and a companion bill was introduced in the House last week.
A newly discovered type of oil-eating microbe suddenly is flourishing in the Gulf of Mexico and gobbling up the BP spill at a much faster rate than expected, scientists reported Tuesday.
Scientists discovered the new microbe while studying the underwater dispersion of millions of gallons of oil spilled since the explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.
Also, the microbe works without significantly depleting oxygen in the water, researchers reported in the online journal Sciencexpress.
"Our findings ... suggest that a great potential for intrinsic bioremediation of oil plumes exists in the deep-sea," lead researcher Terry Hazen, a microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, California, said in a statement.
The data is also the first ever on microbial activity from a deep-water dispersed oil plume, Hazen said.
Environmentalists have raised fears about the giant oil spill and the underwater plume of dispersed oil, particularly its potential effects on sea life. A report just last week described a 22-mile-long underwater mist of tiny oil droplets.
"Our findings show that the influx of oil profoundly altered the microbial community by significantly stimulating deep-sea" cold temperature bacteria that are closely related to known petroleum-degrading microbes, Hazen reported.
Their findings are based on more than 200 samples collected from 17 deep-water sites between May 25 and June 2. They found that the dominant microbe in the oil plume is a new species, closely related to members of Oceanospirillales.
This microbe thrives in cold water, with temperatures in the deep recorded at 41 degrees Fahrenheit.
Hazen suggested that the bacteria may have adapted over time due to periodic leaks and natural seeps of oil in the Gulf.
Scientists also had been concerned that oil-eating activity by microbes would consume large amounts of oxygen in the water and create a "dead zone" dangerous to other life. The new study found that oxygen saturation outside the oil plume was 67 percent while within the plume it was 59 percent.
"The low concentrations of iron in seawater may have prevented oxygen concentrations dropping more precipitously from biodegradation demand on the petroleum, since many hydrocarbon-degrading enzymes have iron as a component," Hazen said. "There's not enough iron to form more of these enzymes, which would degrade the carbon faster but also consume more oxygen."
These latest findings may initially seem to be at odds with the study published last Thursday in Science by researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which confirmed the existence of the oil plume and said microorganisms did not seem to be biodegrading it very quickly.
However, Hazen and Rich Camilli of Woods Hole both said Tuesday that the studies complement each other.
The Woods Hole team used a robot submarine and a mass spectrometer to detect the plume, but were forced to leave the area in late June, when Hurricane Alex threatened. At that time, they figured the plume was likely to remain for some time.
But that was before the well was capped in mid-July. Hazen said that within two weeks of the capping, the plume could not be detected, but there was a phenomenon called marine snow that indicated microbes had been feasting on hydrocarbons.
As of Tuesday, there was no sign of the plume, Hazen said.
That doesn't mean there is no oil left from the 4.9 million barrels of crude that spilled into the Gulf after the April 20 blowout at BP's Deepwater Horizon rig. The U.S. government estimated on Aug. 4 that 50 percent of the BP oil is gone from the Gulf and the rest is rapidly degrading.
The research was supported by an existing grant with the Energy Biosciences Institute, a partnership led by the U.C. Berkeley and the University of Illinois that is funded by a $500 million, 10-year grant from BP. Other support came from the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Oklahoma Research Foundation.
Sciencexpress is the online edition of the journal Science.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
Carbon dioxide is being stocked in underground reservoirs in the Algerian desert as part of a new way to stop the greenhouse gas from contributing to global warming. But will it work?
In what's being hailed as a record expansion of residential rooftop solar power, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a partial loan guarantee of $344 million to the SolarStrong Project.
Helming the project is the SolarCity Corporation who will install, own and operate up to 160,000 rooftop solar installations on up to 124 U.S. military bases in as many as 33 states. SolarCity predicts, over the next five years, the the project will create approximately 750 construction jobs and 28 full time operating jobs, many of which are expected to be filled by U.S. veterans and military families.
Epidendrosaurus (Greek for "lizard in the tree"); pronounced EP-ih-DEN-dro-SORE-us
Epidendrosaurus (Matt Martyniuk)
Habitat:
Woodlands of Asia
Historical Period:
Late Jurassic (150 million years ago)
Size and Weight:
About 6 inches long and one pound
Diet:
Probably omnivorous
Distinguishing Characteristics:
Tiny size; long arms with clawed hands
Epidendrosaurus:
Archaeopteryx gets all the press, but there's a convincing case to be made that Epidendrosaurus was the first reptile to be closer to a bird than to a dinosaur. This pint-sized theropod was less than half the size of its more famous cousin, and it's a sure bet that it was covered with feathers. Most notably, Epidendrosaurus appears to have been adapted to an arboreal (tree-dwelling) lifestyle--its small size would have made it a simple matter to hop from branch to branch, and its long, curved claws were likely used to pry insects from tree bark.
So was Epidendrosaurus really a bird rather than a dinosaur? As with all of the feathered "dino-birds," as these reptiles are called, it's impossible to say. It's better to think of the categories of "bird" and "dinosaur" as lying along a continuum, with some genera closer to either extreme and some smack in the middle.
_________________________________________________________________ Check outBob's Dinosaur Blog !
Bob Strauss is a freelance writer and book author; one of his specialties is explaining scientific concepts and discoveries to both a lay and professional audience.
Bob Strauss is the author of two best-selling question-and-answer books that range across the expanse of science, biology, history and culture: The Big Book of What, How and Why (Main Street, 2005) and Who Knew? Hundreds & Hundreds of Questions & Answers for Curious Minds (Sterling Innovation, 2007).
