Fossil River : May 2012

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.

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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New Studies Show Impact on Coast

Phytoplankton: Oil Sensitivity

A group of the phytoplankton Ditylum brightwellii

Photograph by Bill Curtsinger, National Geographic

Phytoplankton, whose name literally means "plant drifter," are a presence just beneath the surface of the Gulf, detectable only by the green gloss they lend to the water due to the chlorophyll in their cells. as seen above. But they provide an important base in the aquatic food chain. And following the Gulf spill, researchers from the University of South Carolina (USC) found that even small exposures to oil can have large impacts on these microscopic algae.

"Exposure to very small concentrations of crude oil can result in major shifts in phytoplankton community composition as well as a reduction in total phytoplankton biomass," said James Pinckney, associate professor at USC and a co-author of a study published in January in the journal Estuaries and Coasts.

The researchers attempted to simulate oil spill conditions to examine short-term, two-day changes in phytoplankton community composition and total biomass. In Nalgene polycarbonate bottles, they combined water from Clambake Landing in North Inlet near Georgetown, South Carolina, a National Estuarine Research Reserve, with two separate oil samples, one obtained from the Deepwater Horizon spill and the other a mixture of Texas crude oils. They analyzed a control and six replicated experimental treatments of crude oil at various concentrations.

"Crude oil spills may impact many marsh organisms," the researchers wrote. "But phytoplankton represent a major food source for many larval, juvenile, and adult fish and shellfish species."

There is concern that the changes the researchers observed could lead to a decrease in overall marsh productivity. Continued research is needed on the longer-term impacts of crude oil exposure to phytoplankton and whether the community composition will return to pre-exposure composition after the crude oil is removed, Pinckney says.

—Stacey Schultz

New and Frozen Frontier Awaits Offshore Oil Drilling

By JOHN M. BRODER and CLIFFORD KRAUSS

Jim Wilson/New York Times

Edward Itta, the former mayor of North Slope Borough and an Inupiat Eskimo, campaigned against offshore drilling.

WASHINGTON — Shortly before Thanksgiving in 2010, the leaders of the commission President Obama had appointed to investigate the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico sat down in the Oval Office to brief him.

After listening to their findings about the BP accident and the safety of deepwater drilling, the president abruptly changed the subject.

“Where are you coming out on the offshore Arctic?” he asked.

William K. Reilly, a former chief of the Environmental Protection Agency and a commission co-chairman, was startled, as was Carol M. Browner, the president’s top adviser at the time on energy and climate change. Although a proposal by Shell to drill in the Arctic had been a source of dissension, it was not a major focus of the panel’s work.

“It’s not deep water, right?” the president said, noting that Shell’s proposal involved low-pressure wells in 150 feet of water, nothing like BP’s 5,000-foot high-pressure well that blew out in the gulf.

“What that told me,” Mr. Reilly later recounted, “was that the president had already gotten deeply into this issue and was prepared to go forward.”

The president’s preoccupation with the Arctic proposal, even as the nation was still reeling from the BP spill, was the first hint that Shell’s audacious plan to drill in waters previously considered untouchable had gone from improbable to inevitable.

Barring a successful last-minute legal challenge by environmental groups, Shell will begin drilling test wells off the coast of northern Alaska in July, opening a new frontier in domestic oil exploration and accelerating a global rush to tap the untold resources beneath the frozen ocean.

It is a moment of major promise and considerable danger.

Industry experts and national security officials view the Alaskan Arctic as the last great domestic oil prospect, one that over time could bring the country a giant step closer to cutting its dependence on foreign oil.

But many Alaska Natives and environmental advocates say drilling threatens wildlife and pristine shorelines, and perpetuates the nation’s reliance on dirty fossil fuels.

More Details Here

Gulf Spill New Studies Show Impact on Coast

Microorganisms: Life Cycles Disrupted

Fishermen inspect cane grass damaged by oil

Photograph by David Snyder, ZUMApress. com/Alamy

Fishermen inspect damaged cane grass soon after the Gulf spill, knowing that the oil has killed the small organisms upon which fish and crabs of the wetlands depend for food. By now, everyone knows of the oil-eating microorganisms that helped Gulf recovery. But as is clear in this marsh grass and elsewhere, some of the Gulf's tiniest denizens did not fare well.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill inhibited microorganisms' nitrogen cycle, which is critical to ecosystem development and decomposition, according to research by Florida Gulf Coast University.

While some bacteria served as "glorious brave fighters" to help clean up the spill by breaking down the oil, other groups of microorganisms such as archaea were victims, Hidetoshi Urakawa, the lead researcher and assistant professor of the university's department of marine and ecological sciences, said by email.
"The important finding of our study was that oil spills not only damage marine animals and entire food webs, but also the nitrogen cycle, which is one of the major bloodstreams of our planet," Urakawa said.
The data, published in February in the journal Environmental Pollution, found that one common archae bacterium called Nitrosopumilus maritimus showed a particularly high sensitivity to crude oil.
That susceptibility may have an ecological significance, even leading to a shift to bacterial dominance in the aftermath of a major oil spill, the researchers said. But they also cautioned that the variation in petroleum toxicity might be explained in part by the different sizes of microorganisms.

Urakawa said it also might be possible to take the most sensitive archaea and develop a bioassay to measure and monitor petroleum toxicity in the seawater and "help map a future spill."
To conduct their study, the researchers collected tar balls that had drifted ashore in nearby Panama City, Florida, and tested the toxicity responses of bacteria and archaea to oil contamination.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill provided an opportunity to "think about some of the unseen damages of nature" in the deep ocean, Urakawa said. Jose Barreto, professor of Florida Gulf Coast University's department of chemistry and mathematics, collaborated on the project.

—Jeff Smith

The Demise of a Wooden Dinosaur

The microstructure of Smets' "dinosaur" revealed the fossils to be petrified wood. From Hovelacque, 1890.

Naming a new dinosaur is a tricky thing. More often than not, previously unknown dinosaurs first appear as bits and pieces, and more than a few dinosaurs have been established on little more than isolated teeth. Thanks to the uncertainties often inherent in describing new dinosaurs, sometimes what seem to be novel species turn out to be parts of previously known animals. That’s just how science works—ideas are constantly being investigated and tested. But I’m sure that was little consolation to a 19th century scientist who mistakenly named a new dinosaur from petrified plants.

In 1887, naturalist Abbe G. Smets announced the discovery of Aachenosaurus multidens. Not much of the organism survived in the fossil record—just two dark-colored fragments—but Smets was so confident in his ability to restore the whole animal that he issued a full-scale restoration of a Hadrosaurus-like dinosaur.

Other naturalists were not impressed. Paleontologist Louis Dollo and botanist Maurice Hovelacque didn’t see a dinosaur in the fossil pieces. The fragments, Dollo and Hovelacque concluded, were actually bits of fossil wood!

Smets was outraged. How dare Dollo and Hovelacque deride his discovery? Smets viciously attacked his peers in print, but this only undermined his case. The microstructure of the fossils clearly revealed them to be wood, not bone, and Smets’ anger could not change that fact. As naturalists G.A. Boulenger and Richard Lydekker wrote in a 1889 Geological Magazine article about the controversy, Smets appeared to:

… have followed the Old Bailey maxim, that when you have no case, the only thing left is to abuse the plaintiff and all connected to him.

Indeed, Boulenger and Lydekker were especially aggravated to find that Smets had attempted to use their research to discredit Dollo and Hovelacque. Both men were well-respected naturalists and no amount of name-calling by Smets was going to change that. Smets was only making a fool of himself by trying to turn other naturalists upon each other, and his wooden dinosaur rotted away.

A Little Independent Energy Experiment on the Prairie

If you can fight your way through the dirt storms of Madelia, Minnesota, you may be able to find the future of renewable energy

By Maggie Koerth-Baker
Smithsonian.com

Madelia, Minnesota is a small town with a big plan to produce fuel made from local materials for local markets. Maggie Koerth-Baker

In the middle of the Minnesota prairie sits Madelia, a town of a little more than 2300 people that is surrounded on all sides by miles upon miles of brown soil, tilled into neat rows. If you flew there in an airplane, Madelia would look like a button, sewn into the middle of a patchwork quilt—each farm divided into fields shaped like squares and circles, bordered by pale yellow gravel roads and by the narrow strips of bright green grass that grow alongside creeks and drainage ditches.

When the residents of a town such as Madelia think about the future of energy, the solutions they come up with are unsurprisingly centered on the land and what it can grow. In Madelia, however, those solutions look a little different from what you might expect. When Madelians imagine the future of energy, they don’t see prairie dotted with big ethanol refineries, where corn grown by hundreds of farmers is processed into fuel that will be sold all around the United States. Instead, they’re thinking about something much more local. Madelia is a small town with a big plan to produce fuel made from local materials for local markets. From the native grasses that easily grow in prairie soil to leftover beaks and pieces from a nearby chicken canning factory, anything that can grow within a 25-mile radius of town is fair game.

Why would a generally conservative town, populated by a lot of generally risk-averse farm families, want to stake a decent amount of time and money on the cutting edge of alternative energy? When I traveled to Madelia, I ran headlong into the reason before I’d even reached the town itself. My moment of enlightenment happened a few miles outside the city limits, on the narrow blacktop of Highway 60, when I came very close to driving my car into a ditch.

Details Here

Notable Feathered Dinosaurs: Mononykus

Name:

Mononykus (Greek for "single claw"); pronounced MON-oh-NYE-cuss

Habitat:

Plains of Asia

Historical Period:

Late Cretaceous (80-70 million years ago)

Size and Weight:

About 3 feet long and 10 pounds

Diet:

Insects

Distinguishing Characteristics:

Long legs; long claws on hands

About Mononykus:

More often than not, paleontologists can infer a dinosaur's behavior from its anatomy. That's the case with Mononykus, whose small size, long legs, and long, curved claws point to it being an insectivore that spent its day clawing at the Cretaceous equivalent of termite mounds. Like other small theropods, Mononykus was probably covered in feathers, and represented an intermediate stage in the evolution of dinosaurs into birds.

By the way, you may notice that the spelling of Mononykus isn't quite orthodox by Greek standards. That's because its original name, Mononychus, turned out to have been preoccupied by a genus of beetle, so paleontologists had to get creative. (At least Mononykus was given a name: discovered way back in 1923, its fossil languished in storage for over 60 years, classified as belonging to an "unidentified bird-like dinosaur.")

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Check out Bob'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).

Fuel for Thought

Cars that run on vegetable oil? Do-it-yourselfers and entrepreneurs alike fill 'er up with the nation's fastest-growing propellant

By Frances Cerra Whittelsey

Smithsonian magazine

Every few weeks, Etta Kantor goes to a Chinese restaurant and fills a couple of five-gallon pails with used cooking oil. Back in her garage, the 59-year-old philanthropist and grandmother strains it through a cloth filter and then pours it into a custom-made second fuel tank in her 2003 Volkswagen Jetta diesel station wagon. Once the car is warmed up, she flips a fuel toggle on the dashboard to switch to the vegetable oil. Wherever she drives, she’s trailed by the appetizing odor of egg rolls.

Sean Parks of Davis, California, collects his cooking oil from a fish-and-chips restaurant and a corn-dog shop. He purifies it chemically in a 40-gallon reactor that he built himself for about $200. The processed oil can be used even when his car's engine is cold, at a cost of about 70 cents a gallon. Parks, 30, a geographer for the U.S. Forest Service, makes enough processed oil to fuel his family's two cars.

Kantor and Parks are willing to go the extra mile to reduce their dependence on petroleum and cut down on pollution. But these days environmentalists are not the only ones banking on biodiesel, as diesel-engine fuel made from vegetable oil is known. Entrepreneurs and soybean farmers are creating a new biodiesel industry, with some 300 retail biodiesel pumps nationwide so far. Commercial production of biodiesel grew 25 percent in 2004, making it the fastest-growing alternative fuel in the United States. Even the singer Willie Nelson recently started a company to market the fuel at truck stops.

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Notable Feathered Dinosaurs: Microraptor

Microraptor (Greek for "small thief"); pronounced MY-crow-rap-tore

Habitat:

Woodlands of Asia

Historical Period:

Early Cretaceous (130-125 million years ago)

Size and Weight:

About 2 feet long and 3-4 pounds

Diet:

Probably insects

Distinguishing Characteristics:

Tiny size; primitive feathers; wings on arms and legs

About Microraptor:

Probably because it was so small, Microraptor fossilized unusually well--paleontologists in China have unearthed about two dozen more-or-less complete specimens of this tiny, feathered raptor of the early Cretaceous period, complete with traces of internal organs and primitive feathers.

The most spectacular fact about Microraptor is that it had not one, but two, sets of primitive wings--one on its forearms (similar to other birdlike Dinosaurs, like Archeopteryx,), and one on its hind legs. This formidable feathered arsenal notwithstanding, scientists believe Microraptor was, at best, an occasional glider, much like a flying squirrel--and probably spent most of its life high up in the branches of trees. (A recent study has shown that the feathers of Microraptor were black and glossy, and likely evolved more as a way to attract mates than to fly the short distances between trees.)

This leads to the important question: was Microraptor a crucial "missing link" in the gradual evolution of dinosaurs into birds, or did it represent a four-winged experiment that (literally) never quite got off the ground? The answer may await future fossil discoveries, but the lack of any four-winged birds living today should give you an important clue.

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Check out Bob'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.

Nature Yields New Ideas for Energy and Efficiency

Rippling With Energy

Photograph by Mauricio Handler, National Geographic

Long strands of bull kelp ripple beneath the surface of churning coastal waters, drawing fuel from the sun and, perhaps, pointing out a better way for humanity to capture and use energy.

Seaweed is just one of the innovations of nature from which engineers are drawing inspiration as they seek to design energy systems that are cleaner and more efficient. In plants—the engines of photosynthesis—and in creatures as small as insects and as large as whales, advocates of "biomimicry" are looking for systems that can help humanity better meet the challenge of fueling civilization sustainably.

Biomimicry simply means using designs inspired by nature to solve human problems. The idea is that over 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature itself has solved many of the problems that humanity finds itself grappling with today. Since energy is one of the greatest challenges facing the world, with much of the research aimed at designing systems that would work in greater harmony with the planet, it is not surprising that science would look to nature for answers.

Bull kelp, named for its bullwhip shape, is one of the strongest and most flexible seaweeds in the world and can grow up to 100 feet from its holdfast (similar to roots) on the sea floor to the tips of its leaves. The movement of the kelp's leaves as they photosynthesize sunlight into energy inspired at least one Australian company, which is seeking to commercialize a system that generates energy from the gentle motion of floats bobbing up and down in the waves.

—Rachel Kaufman
This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.