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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Ten New Studies Show Impact on Coast

Communities: Deep Ties, Deeper Pain

A man on a dock on Bayou La Batre, Alabama

 Photograph by Meggan Haller, Keyhole Photo/Corbis

A man takes a break from refurbishing a boat in Bayou La Batre, Alabama—one of the fishing communities deeply affected by the Gulf spill.

Although community attachment is generally seen as a positive that aids in resilience, researchers from Louisiana State University found the negative mental health impacts of the spill were greatest for longtime residents with complex social networks of relatives, friends, and acquaintances. This sense of connectedness, and the accompanying pain, was underscored as people also depended on local resources for their livelihood.

The study is one of the first to systematically collect and analyze public health data on coastal populations affected by the spill. In a late June 2010 telephone survey of 935 households living in the coastal portions of Plaquemines, La Fourche, and Terrebonne parishes, the study found individuals with stronger community attachment exhibited higher self-reported levels of anxiety, worry, nervousness and fear.

Under normal circumstances, community attachment promotes better physical and mental health, but in times of crisis it can be problematic as people's way of life is threatened, the researchers noted.

"In crisis conditions, among those whose resources are threatened, we find that community attachment is associated with higher levels of negative affect," said the study, published in October 2011 in the journal American Behavioral Scientist.

This held true even for people who were not directly employed by the fishing and oil industries, suggesting that community attachment is strong in this area, and that people felt concerned about others whose livelihoods were directly affected.

But attachment may aid in recovery in the long run. Study lead author Matthew Lee, associate vice chancellor in the Office of Research and Economic Development at LSU, said that follow-up surveys have demonstrated that residents who had high community attachment and increased distress early on, "over time, they also recovered more quickly than those who were not highly attached to their communities." He said the findings are consistent with survey results of people recovering from Hurricane Katrina.
—Stacey Schultz
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