The American Museum of Natural History has a whole Gosiute trout perch in the act of swallowing a herring, recording in its violence two or three seconds from forty-six million years ago. In the museum’s worldwide vertebrate collection, roughly one fossil in five comes from Wyoming, and a high percentage of those are from Gosiute and neighboring lakes. Around the shores were red roses and climbing ferns, hibiscus and soapberries, balloon vines, goldenrain. The trees would generally have been recognizable as well: pines, palms, redwoods, poplars, sycamores, cypresses, maples, willows, oaks. There were water striders, plant hoppers, snout beetles, crickets. The air was full of frigate birds. Dense beds of algae matted the shallows. In all phases zakelijke energie through the eight million years, quantities of organic material mixed with the accumulating sediments and are preserved with them today in the form of oil shale. On the far side of the Uinta Mountains was another great lake, reaching from western Colorado well into Utah. Lake Uinta, as it has come to be called, and Lake Gosiute and several smaller lakes left in their shales a potential oil reserve estimated at about one and a half trillion barrels. This is the world’s largest deposit of hydrocarbons. It is actually nine times the amount of crude oil under Saudi Arabia, and about ten times as much oil as has so far been pumped from American rock. Distinct in the long suite of cuts at Green River were the socalled mahogany ledges, where oil shale is particularly rich. They looked less like wood than like bluish-white slabs of thinly bedded slate. Oil shale always weathers bluish white zakelijke energie vergelijken but is dark inside, and grainy like wood. The thinner the laminae, the higher the ratio of organic material. The richest of the dark oleaginous flakes-each representing the sedimentation of one year-were fifteen-thousandths of a millimetre thick. Love dropped some hydrochloric acid on the rock, and the acid beaded up like an arching cat. “It’s actually kerogen,” he said. “It converts to high-paraffin oil. It’s not like Pennsylvania crude.”