Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

  Distinct in the long suite of cuts at Green River were the so-called 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 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.”

  To mining engineers, oil shale had presented an as yet unsolved and completely unambiguous problem: how to remove the shale without destroying the face of the earth. So far, three principal methods had been considered. One was to strip-mine it, crush it, separate the oil, then smooth out the tailings—a process that could result in the absolute rearrangement of twenty-five thousand square miles. Another was to go underground, excavate a percentage of the rock, and refill the caverns with tailings. That was known as the “modified in situ” approach. And finally someone thought of drilling a hole, pumping in propane, and starting a fire. The heat would cause liquid oil to run out of the shale. The oil could be forced up through another well before the fire destroyed it. A burn would not, like a clinker fire, continue indefinitely. If oxygen was not fed to the flames, they would die. This was known as “true in situ” mining; and there in White Mountain, a few miles away, the federal government had been perfecting the technique. The experiments thus far had brought down the recovery cost to a million dollars a barrel. In Cheyenne one time, I saw a Peter Pan Crunchy Peanut Butter jar filled with such oil. It looked and smelled like the contents of a long unemptied spittoon.

  The one-and-a-half-trillion-barrel estimate was somewhat extravagant, because it included every last drop—referring, as it did, to all shale with any content of kerogen. In the richer rock—in the shales that contained from twenty-five to sixty-five gallons of oil per ton—were no more than six hundred billion barrels. That would do. That was more petroleum in place than all the petroleum produced in the world to date. Love remarked that oil shale had been “trumpeted to the skies” but, with the energy crisis in perigee, both government and industry were losing interest and pulling out. Temporarily pulling out. Sooner or later, people were going to want that shale.

  For Lake Gosiute to have lasted so long in a mountain setting, Love said, an amazing delicacy of crustal balance was required. As the lakebed thickened, it had to subside at an appropriate rate if it was to continue to hold water and accept sediment. Gosiute sediments average about half a mile, top to bottom. The oil is at all levels. The evaporite phase, in the middle, reports a Gosiute of dense and complex brine that was surrounded by mud flats sickeningly attended by the hum of flies. Trona—sodium sesquicarbonate—precipitated out of the brine in concentrations rare in the world. It was discovered in 1938, but the boom did not begin until the sixties. We tasted some salty crystals in the rock at Green River, in beds that dipped west and pointed into the ground toward mines. Trona is an important component of ceramics and textiles, pulp and paper, iron and steel, and, most especially, glass. Love commented that more than two tons of trona had been going into the Green River every day merely from the washing of freight cars—and that was a lot of sodium. The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality had put a stop to the practice. He said there had been a brewery in Green River that drew its water from a well drilled to trona. The beer had a head like a stomach tablet. A few miles south of us were the headwaters of the reservoir that covered Flaming Gorge. Before the federal Bureau of Reclamation built a dam there, Flaming Gorge was one of the scenic climaxes of the American West—a seven-hundred-foot canyon in arching Triassic red beds so bright they did indeed suggest flame. Afterward, not much was left but the hiss, and an eyebrow of rock above the water. The reservoir stilled fifty miles of river. Some of the high water penetrates beds of trona. When the reservoir drops, dissolved trona comes out of the rock and drips into the reservoir. When water rises again, it goes back into the rock for more trona. Love said that Lake Powell and Lake Mead—reservoirs downstream—were turning into chemical lakes as a result. “And a lot of it winds up with the poor farmers in Mexico,” he said. “We are going to have to desalinate their water.” Some miles along the interstate, when we crossed the Blacks Fork River, we would see alkali deposits lying in the floodplain like dried white scum. On both sides of the road were abandoned farmhouses, abandoned barns, their darkly weathered boards warping away from empty structures out of plumb. The river precipitates and the abandoned farms were not unrelated. This was the Lyman irrigation project, Love explained—a conception of the Bureau of Reclamation, an attempt to make southwestern Wyoming competitive with Wisconsin. The Blacks Fork River was dammed in 1971, and its waters were used to soak the land. The land became whiter than a bleached femur. It still appeared to be covered with light snow. “Alkali sours the land,” Love said. “The drainage here is just too poor to flush it out. Imagine the sodium those farmers drank in their water.”

  Meanwhile, west of Green River, a tall incongruous chimney seemed to rise up out of the range, streaming a white plume downwind. Below the chimney, but hidden by the roll of the land, was a trona refinery, and, below the refinery, a mine. I had gone down into it one winter day half a dozen months before, and I now remarked that the people there had told me that the white cloud issuing from the chimney was pure steam.

  “It goes clear across the state,” Love said. “That’s pretty durable for steam.”

  He said that fluorine, among other things, was coming out of the refinery with the steam. Settling downwind, it could cause fluorosis. He thought it might be damaging forests in the Wind River Range. The afternoon sky was cloudless but not exactly clear. “The haze you see is the trona haze that goes across Wyoming,” he continued. “We never used to have this. You could clearly see distant mountains on any average day.”

  Trona is about as hard as a fingernail, and much of it looks like maple sugar or honey-colored butter crunch. I remembered drinking coffee at a picnic table nine hundred feet below us, in a twilighted Kafkan dusty world where dynamite provoked reverberate thunders that moved from room to room and eventually clapped themselves. Chain saws with bars ten feet long sliced into the rock to define the next blast. Stickers on lunch pails said:

  DON’T TEMPT FATE.

  I HAVE MET THE A-O DUST DEMON.

  WHEN ESCAPE IS CUT OFF: 1. BARRICADE 2. LISTEN FOR 3 SHOTS 3. SIGNAL BY POUNDING HARD 10 TIMES 4. REST 15 MINUTES THEN REPEAT SIGNAL UNTIL 5. YOU HEAR 5 SHOTS, WHICH MEANS YOU ARE LOCATED AND HELP IS ON THE WAY.

  “The Southeast is the stroke and hypertension belt of the United States,” Love was saying. “That is blamed on sodium, including sodium in the water. We’re not far behind. Perhaps we can overtake them.”

  By the Gros Ventre River near Crystal Creek, some years ago, Love noticed horses eating the Cloverly formation—putting their noses right on the outcrop and slurping up nodules of soft Cretaceous lime. He could guess where the horses had come from. They were from Cora, near Pinedale, at the western base of the Wind River Mountains. When the Wind Rivers came rising up during the Laramide Revolution and moved a few miles west, they completely covered the only limestone in the region. As a result, he said, it is not unusual for a college freshman who has grown up in Pinedale to require false teeth. Pinedale has one of the two or three highest records of dental decay in Wyoming. Pinedale is to caries as Savannah is to coronary thrombosis, in each case for a geological reason.

  He said that somewhere in limbo on the industrial drawing board was a geothermal project that would mine the hot groundwaters of the Island Park Caldera, southwest of Yellowstone. The question uppermost in many people’s minds seemed to be: What would happen to Old Faithful and other Yellowstone geysers? In New Zealand, when the government tapped the fift
h-largest geyser field in the world for geothermal energy the Karapiti Blowhole shut down as promptly as if a hand had turned a valve. A geyser field in Nevada once rivalled Yellowstone’s—until 1961, when geothermal well drilling killed the Nevada geysers. Old Faithful was having trouble enough without help from the hand of man. For a century, and who knows how much longer, Old Faithful had erupted at intervals averaging seventy minutes, but in 1959 the earthquake at Hebgen Lake, nearby in Montana, slowed the geyser down. Additional earthquakes in 1975 and 1983 caused Old Faithful to become so erratic that visitors complained. Constructed around the geyser is something that resembles a stadium, where crowds collect in bleachers and expect Old Faithful to be faithful: “to play,” as hydrologists put it—to burst in timely fashion from its fissures, like a cuckoo clock made of water and steam. Frustrated travellers, sometimes clapping their hands in unison, seemed to be calling on the National Park Service to repair the geyser. A scientist confronted with these facts could only shrug, make observations, and formulate a law: The volume of the complaints varies inversely with the number of miles per gallon attained by the vehicles that bring people to the park.

  Love, who has made a subspecialty of the medical effects of geology, had other matters on his mind. In public lectures and in meetings with United States senators, he asked what consideration was being given to radioactive water from geothermal wells, which would be released into the Snake River through Henrys Fork and carried a thousand miles downstream. After all, radioactive water was known from Crawfish Creek, Polecat Creek, and Huckleberry Hot Springs, not to mention the Pitchstone Plateau. On the Pitchstone Plateau were colonies of radioactive plants, and radioactive animals that had eaten the plants: gophers, mice, and squirrels with so much radium in them that their bodies could be placed on photographic paper and they would take their own pictures. A senator answered the question, saying, “No one has brought that up.”

  At the Overthrust Belt—glamorized of late for its fresh new yields of regular and unleaded—we moved up in topography, down in time, because the great thrust sheets are older than the rock on which they came to rest. The first high ridge was Cretaceous in age, and we left the interstate to climb it, on an extremely steep doublerutted dirt road that led to a mountain valley—a so-called strike valley, of a type that will form where upturned strata angle into the sky and a section is softer than those that flank it. The high valley was fringed with junipers, and, from its eastern rim, presented a view that would impress an astronaut. To look from left to right was to see a hundred and fifty miles, from the Uinta Mountains to the Wind River Range, interspersed with badlands. The badlands were late-Eocene river muds and sands chaotically distributed on top of the filled-in lake, and now being further strewn about at the whim of cloudbursts.

  In the center of the high swale were the silvery-gray remains of hundreds of cut trees, which had been dragged into the open and arranged as a fence in kidney-bean shape, all but enclosing about fifteen acres. Vaguely, they formed a double corral, with an aperture in one place only, and had apparently been used—for uncounted years—to trap antelopes. Antelopes don’t climb fences, as people fond of roast pronghorn discovered centuries ago. Love’s son Charlie, the professor of anthropology and geology at Western Wyoming Community College, knew of the trap and had thought out the strategies by which it was effective. His father expressed pride in Charlie for “thinking as intelligently as the aborigines.” The high valley held fast an aesthetic silence—a silence reminiscent of the Basin and Range, a silence equal to the winter Yukon. About the only sign of humankind was the antelope trap. This was the Overthrust Belt as it had appeared before white people—thinking intelligently but not like the aborigines—mapped the terrain, modelled its structure, and went after what lay beneath it. There were mountain bluebells and salt sage in the valley, ground phlox and prickly pear. Love reached down and plucked up a plant and asked if I knew what it was. It looked familiar, and I said, “Wild onion.”

  He said, “It’s death camas. It brings death quickly. It killed many pioneer children. They thought it looked like wild onion.”

  Suddenly, the great silence was smashed by running gunfire as two four-wheel-drive vehicles, each with a lone rider, appeared over the western rim and thundered up the valley, leaving behind them puffs of blue smoke. They disappeared to the north, still shooting. This was boom country now, however temporarily—another world of pickups painted with flames. It had been described in journals as “the hottest oil-and-gas province in North America”—a phrase in which Love found bemusement and irony, because for three-quarters of a century the hottest oil-and-gas province in North America had been lying there neglected.

  “This region was written up in 1907 as containing possible oil fields,” Love said. “They’re ‘finding’ them now. That 1907 paper, by A. C. Veatch, of the U.S.G.S., was simply ignored. Until 1975, people said there was no oil in the thrust belt. Now it’s the hot area. Veatch did his work in the part of the thrust belt that straddles I-80. He said oil should be there, and he said where. His paper is a classic. That it was ignored shows the myopia of oil companies, and of geologists in general. The La Barge oil field, in the Green River Basin off the edge of the thrust belt, was discovered in 1924. Twenty years later it became evident that the La Barge field was producing more oil than the structure could contain. The oil was migrating into it from the thrust belt. The evidence was there before us, and we didn’t see it. We talked about it. We wondered why. Now the margins of basins have become new frontiers for oil. Anywhere that mountains have overridden a basin, there are likely to be Cretaceous and Paleocene rocks below, quite possibly with oil and gas. The Moncrief oil company drilled through nine thousand feet of granite at Arminto and into Cretaceous rocks and got the god-damnedest field you ever saw.”

  On I-80 to the end of Wyoming, we moved among the drilling rigs and pump jacks of some of the most productive fields you ever saw. Love said, “These rigs are not damaging the landscape very much. It isn’t all or nothing. It doesn’t have to be.” I remembered a time when we had gazed down into the Precambrian metasediments of a taconite mine off the southern tip of the Wind River Range. It was an open pit, square, more than a mile on a side. I asked him how he felt about a thing like that, and he said, “They’ve only ruined one side of the mountain. Behind the pit, the range top is covered with snow. I can live with this. This is a part of the lifeblood of our nation.” I recalled also that when the Beartooth Highway was built, ascending the wall of a Swiss-like valley to subsummit meadows of unique beauty, Love defended the project, saying that people who could not get around so well would be enabled to see those scenes.

  Love is an unsalaried adjunct professor at the University of Wyoming, an adviser to graduate students in Laramie and in the field. The imaginations of graduate students have a tendency to go dark when the time arrives to choose a topic for a thesis. Typically, they say to him, “Everything has been done.”

  “Nonsense,” says the adjunct professor. “I can blindfold you and have you throw a dart at the geologic map of Wyoming, and wherever it hits you’ll find a subject for a thesis.”

  One day in Jackson Hole, in a small log cabin Love for many years used as a field office, I asked him if I could throw a dart at the geologic map of Wyoming. “Be my guest,” he said, and I sent one flying three times, scoring my first, third, and only Ph.D.s. The second one, for me, struck closest to home. It landed by Sweetwater Creek under Nipple Mesa, a couple of miles from Sunlight Peak in the North Absaroka Wilderness—eight miles from Yellowstone Park. “You have hit the Sunlight intrusives,” Love said, and somehow I expected the sound of falling coins. “The area has not been surveyed,” he continued. “There’s no grid. Along Sweetwater Creek are mineral springs and oil seeps. A consortium of major oil companies wants the region removed from wilderness designation.” The oil fields of the Bighorn Basin march across the sageland right to the feet of the Absarokas, he said, and their presence asks a great structural questi
on: How far does the basin reach under the mountains? Since the Absarokas are made of volcanic debris, the oil seeping out of the banks of Sweetwater Creek could not have originated in Absarokan rock. He said he thought that the oil-bearing rock of the Bighorn Basin might go under the mountains all the way to Mammoth.