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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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
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