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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Big picture: Spill

 by Daniel Beltrá '


Daniel Beltrá says aerial photography offers a humbling perspective. Photograph: ©Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace

It was the world's worst offshore oil spill: 5m barrels spewing from the BP-run Deepwater Horizon rig into the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 people, marine life and devastating hundreds of miles of coastline. From a Cessna floatplane 3,000ft above the Louisiana coastline, photographer Daniel Beltrá captured the carnage. It was only from this height, he said, that the magnitude of the spill – and the futility of the clean-up operation – became apparent. "It was like trying to clean an Olympic pool full of oil while sitting on the side using Q-tips."

An environmental specialist who often works for Greenpeace, Beltrá prefers aerial photography, because it offers a humbling perspective, shrinking the scale of the planet to more human proportions and thereby revealing its fragility. This lofty viewpoint often shows the beauty of the natural world: in the case of a disaster, though, that can be unsettling. Here, the surface of the ocean is marbled with spectacular, iridescent blue and flashes of orange that resemble molten rock, and the rig, at first glance, might be a Hindu temple.

In the two years since the wellhead was sealed, the fallout has continued. BP has embarked on a selling spree of oilfields and refineries in an attempt to raise funds for the clean-up bill – estimated at $38bn. The company is working towards a settlement with the US government, with both sides trying to establish how much damage was done, and how much BP should pay.

The environment is counting the cost, too. Most recently, waves caused by Hurricane Isaac in August dumped oil from the spill on two Louisiana beaches. Beltrá, meanwhile, is documenting low levels of sea ice in the Arctic. He is one photographer unlikely to be out of work any time soon.

Spill is on show at the Prix Pictet/Power exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, London SW3, from 10-28 October.
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