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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?
Fossils That Made Dinosaur History: Coelophysis (1947)
Although Coelophysis was named in 1889 (by the famous paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope), this early theropod didn't make a splash in the popular imagination until 1947, when Edwin H. Colbert found innumerable Coelophysis skeletons tangled together at the Ghost Ranch fossil site in New Mexico. This showed that some genera of small theropods, just like hadrosaurs and ornithopods, traveled in herds--and that large populations of dinosaurs, meat-eaters and plant-eaters alike, were regularly caught unawares by flash floods.
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World’s Worst Power Outages
New York, 1977
Photograph by Tom Cunningham, NY Daily News/Getty Images
A lack of power poses plenty of inherent problems, but massive blackouts can also lead to bad behavior. A lightning-sparked outage in 1977, which left 9 million New Yorkers without power, lasted only about 24 hours on July 13 and July 14. But during that time, arsonists torched buildings like these on Marmion Avenue in the Bronx, setting a reported 1,000 fires. Looters and rioters also ran rampant and trashed some 1,600 stores during what Mayor Abraham Beame called "a night of terror." When similar outages struck the city in 2003, however, such problems were few and far between.
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Photograph by Tom Cunningham, NY Daily News/Getty Images
A lack of power poses plenty of inherent problems, but massive blackouts can also lead to bad behavior. A lightning-sparked outage in 1977, which left 9 million New Yorkers without power, lasted only about 24 hours on July 13 and July 14. But during that time, arsonists torched buildings like these on Marmion Avenue in the Bronx, setting a reported 1,000 fires. Looters and rioters also ran rampant and trashed some 1,600 stores during what Mayor Abraham Beame called "a night of terror." When similar outages struck the city in 2003, however, such problems were few and far between.
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HOPEFUL ENERGY STORIES: Concern for Wildlife Alters Energy Plans
Photograph by Joel Sartore
Bison cluster on the native grassland at Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge, just one example of the Nebraska wildlife in the ecosystem at the center of a major energy battle this year—the fight over the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline.
Pressure built against the project in part over concern for the unique 19,600-square-mile (51,000-square-kilometer) ecosystem in Nebraska called the Sandhills, and the Obama administration blocked the proposed pipeline route. (See "Pictures: Animals That Blocked Keystone XL Pipeline Path.") TransCanada says it remains fully committed to the project to move crude from Canada's oil sands some 1,700 miles (2,740 kilometers) to refineries in Texas, and a decision on a revised plan is expected from Washington early in 2013.
Climate change activists are sure to continue their opposition, because of concern over carbon-intensive oil sands production. But the debate forced a rethinking of the project with renewed attention on the importance of protecting the Sandhills and the underlying Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies drinking water to about 2 million people in Nebraska and seven other states.
On the other side of the globe, in Sabah, Malaysia, threats to the critically endangered Sumatran rhino and vibrant coral reefs derailed a planned coal-fired power plant in one of the region's top biological hot spots—an ecotourism destination to boot. While green advocates hope to see renewable energy thrive here, Sabah's short-term needs will be filled by a 300-megawatt natural gas plant, which is cleaner than the coal alternative. (See "Concern Over Rare Rhino Rouses Clean Energy Drive in Malaysia.")
—Brian Handwerk
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World’s Worst Power Outages
Europe, 2006
Photograph by Joerg Sarbach, AP
Onlookers wait for the newly built cruise ship Norwegian Pearl to leave the Papenburg, Germany, shipyard in November 2006. Soon after, on its trip down the River Ems, the ship indirectly caused a two-hour power outage for some 10 million people on the evening of November 4. The German power company E. turned off a 380,000-volt line over the river so that the ship could pass safely beneath on its way to the North Sea. But the dead line quickly increased pressures elsewhere in the German power grid and then sparked a chain reaction across parts of Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, and Croatia. Critics said the incident showcased the need for more universal electricity distribution policies across Europe.
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Photograph by Joerg Sarbach, AP
Onlookers wait for the newly built cruise ship Norwegian Pearl to leave the Papenburg, Germany, shipyard in November 2006. Soon after, on its trip down the River Ems, the ship indirectly caused a two-hour power outage for some 10 million people on the evening of November 4. The German power company E. turned off a 380,000-volt line over the river so that the ship could pass safely beneath on its way to the North Sea. But the dead line quickly increased pressures elsewhere in the German power grid and then sparked a chain reaction across parts of Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, and Croatia. Critics said the incident showcased the need for more universal electricity distribution policies across Europe.
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More on the Diplodocus
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| Caudal vertebrae of D. carnegii showing the double-beamed chevron bones that the genus name refers to, Natural History Museum, London. |
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| D. longus skull from Bone-Cabin Quarry |
Electricity From Spinach
Don't eat your spinach. Put it on your solar panel instead.
OK, that's not actually advisable. However, it is true that the latest attempt to put photosynthesis to work to produce electricity finds researchers at Vanderbilt University reporting big gains with a new concept that uses a protein found in spinach in combination with carefully formatted silicon.
The research at Vanderbilt uses a specific protein involved in photosynthesis called photosystem 1, which was discovered 40 years ago and apparently quickly seduced solar researchers with its ability to convert sunlight into electrical energy with nearly 100 percent efficiency, according to Vanderbilt.
That the stuff is cheap and plentiful – it can be extracted from the rapidly growing kudzu vine, not just 99-cents-a-bunch spinach – compared to common microelectronic materials only increased the lure, according to Vanderbilt.
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OK, that's not actually advisable. However, it is true that the latest attempt to put photosynthesis to work to produce electricity finds researchers at Vanderbilt University reporting big gains with a new concept that uses a protein found in spinach in combination with carefully formatted silicon.
The research at Vanderbilt uses a specific protein involved in photosynthesis called photosystem 1, which was discovered 40 years ago and apparently quickly seduced solar researchers with its ability to convert sunlight into electrical energy with nearly 100 percent efficiency, according to Vanderbilt.
That the stuff is cheap and plentiful – it can be extracted from the rapidly growing kudzu vine, not just 99-cents-a-bunch spinach – compared to common microelectronic materials only increased the lure, according to Vanderbilt.
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Fossils That Changed Dinosaur History Diplodocus (1877)
The discovery of Diplodocus in western North America's Morrison Formation ushered in the age of the giant sauropods, which have since captured the imagination of the public to a far greater extent than relatively prosaic dinosaurs like Megalosaurus and Iguanodon.
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| Mounted D. carnegii holotype skeleton, Carnegie Museum of Natural History |
Powering The Future: Electricity
The early days of electric power are long behind us, but the principles remain the same: spin a wheel, add a magnet, and you can create an electricity machine -- a generator.
Amazing Places on Earth
The Forest of Knives
Madagascar is truly a lost world. Cut off from the rest of the world, the island's lemur population thrived (they don't exist anywhere else on the planet, except in captivity), and a host of unique life forms evolved in relative isolation. Yet Madagascar's geology also stands apart from the rest of the world's -- especially the region known as Tsingy de Bemaraha.
Here, visitors encounter a forest of upturned limestone daggers. This painful-looking landscape, also known as karst topography, results from long-term dissolution of soluble limestone bedrock. Formerly a massive slab of rock, rainwater has whittled it down into multiple, individual towers of stone. The Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park protects a 600-square-mile (1,554-square-kilometers) region of stone and vegetation.
The inhospitable nature of the tisngy serves to protect a host of creatures, many of which avoided discovery by humans until the 21st century.
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Madagascar is truly a lost world. Cut off from the rest of the world, the island's lemur population thrived (they don't exist anywhere else on the planet, except in captivity), and a host of unique life forms evolved in relative isolation. Yet Madagascar's geology also stands apart from the rest of the world's -- especially the region known as Tsingy de Bemaraha.
Here, visitors encounter a forest of upturned limestone daggers. This painful-looking landscape, also known as karst topography, results from long-term dissolution of soluble limestone bedrock. Formerly a massive slab of rock, rainwater has whittled it down into multiple, individual towers of stone. The Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park protects a 600-square-mile (1,554-square-kilometers) region of stone and vegetation.
The inhospitable nature of the tisngy serves to protect a host of creatures, many of which avoided discovery by humans until the 21st century.
Read More
Fossils That Changed Dinosaur History: Archaeopteryx (1860-62)
In 1860, Charles Darwin published his earth-shaking treatise on evolution, The Origin of Species.
As luck would have it, the next couple of years saw a series of spectacular discoveries at the limestone deposits of Solnhofen, Germany--complete, exquisitely preserved fossils of an ancient creature, Archaeopteryx, that seemed to be the perfect "missing link" between dinosaurs and birds.
Since then, more convincing transitional forms (such as Sinosauropteryx) have been found, but none have had as profound an impact as this pigeon-sized dinosaur.
As luck would have it, the next couple of years saw a series of spectacular discoveries at the limestone deposits of Solnhofen, Germany--complete, exquisitely preserved fossils of an ancient creature, Archaeopteryx, that seemed to be the perfect "missing link" between dinosaurs and birds.
Since then, more convincing transitional forms (such as Sinosauropteryx) have been found, but none have had as profound an impact as this pigeon-sized dinosaur.
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| Archaeopteryx lithographica, specimen displayed at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. (This image shows the original fossil - not a cast.) |
Most Amazing Places on Earth
6. The Crystal Caverns
Nearly 1,000 feet (305 meters) beneath Mexico's Naica silver mine you'll find a chamber of unearthly wonder. Here in Cueva de los Cristales (the Cave of Crystals), 36-foot (11-meter) obelisks of solid crystal lay heaped about like fallen pillars in a dilapidated temple.
This subterranean forest of wonders boasts the largest known gypsums (soft minerals made of hydrate calcium sulfate) on Earth. For roughly half a million years, the hidden chamber was nothing short of a crystal incubator. For starters, nearby magma deposits heat the cavern to temperatures of up to 112 degrees Fahrenheit (44 degrees Celsius). And to top things off, the entire space was flooded with mineral-rich waters up until very recently.
The chamber was discovered in 2000, after mining operations pumped it dry. Today, only a few visitors risk heatstroke to witness the crystals' beauty firsthand.
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