We camped there for a week, hunted for them day after day, and found a handful. Now, in the same place, they’re thicker than fleas on a dog. They can’t cross non-seleniferous barriers, except with the help of human beings. In the Rocky Mountains generally, millions of acres have been converted. People sometimes think neighbors have poisoned their pastures.” Ten miles beyond the North Platte, a flat-topped ridge formed the horizon before us-a tough sandstone, disintegrating at a lower rate than surrounding shale. The interstate, encountering this obstacle, had dealt with it with dynamite, opening up what highway engineers called a benched throughcut and geologists finding such a thing in nature call a wind gap. When we reached it, we stopped, got out, and put our noses on the outcrop, for this high multitiered kantoor huren per uur amsterdam exposure was Frontier sandstone, and Love referred to it as “a published roadcut,” studied to the last grain by paleontologists and stratigraphers. The reason for so much attention was not readily apparent in the gray and somewhat gloomy, sooty-looking rock, antiqued with fossil burrows. Nonetheless, it seemed to excite Loveas he picked at it with his hammer-at least as much as the woody asters had repelled him. The rock had been submarine sand, not far offshore. “Frontier is one of the great oil sands in the Rocky Mountain region,” he said. At five, ten, twenty thousand feet, wildcat after wildcat had found handsome pay in this celebrated host formation, and here it was at the kantoor huren per uur leeuwarden surface, fresh, unweathered, presenting clues to its wealth. Because oil is vulnerable to destruction by increased heat-in the earth as in the engine of a car-the oldest oil that has been recovered in large quantity is probably Cretaceous in age (loosely speaking, about a hundred million years). For about one human life span, geologists have had the ability to discern where, in the subsurface, oil should be. A large percentage of all the oil on earth has been burned up in fifty years. Around i975, the quantity being discovered had diminished to the level of the quantity being burned. Love remarked that half a billion barrels of oil had been found in the Frontier sandstone in one field alone. With reverence, I collected a wormy chunk.