Word: shale
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ENERGY. Demand for energy is expected to triple by the end of the century. Oil and natural gas will gradually decline in importance as the most productive fields are exhausted. Large coal reserves may take their place, and oil shale and lignite may be used. Atomic energy will provide at least half of all U.S. electricity in the year...
...desolate, mountainous region, where the rivers run black over slate and shale. Its miners are a tough, hardy folk, for the equipment they use is outmoded, the coal they dig is of low quality and difficult to extract; a man's average output is only six-tenths of a ton in an eight-hour day, perhaps one-twentieth of a U.S. coal miner's production...
...museum's paleontologists had often rummaged through the black shale of the Granton quarry, but none of them could match Alfred's collection of fossils...
Last summer Alfred began to prowl the quarry with Joe Geiler and Mike Bandrowski, who had joined the project just a few months before. A large area was being leveled for the construction of a supermarket, and Alfred led his small but expert crew to a place where shale lay near the surface. They dug down to the dark rock and brought big slabs to the surface. They found some coelacanth fossils first but ignored them as commonplace. Then they split another slab, and Alfred knew at once that they had come upon something extraordinary. In the shale...
Ancient Glider. Dr. Colbert recognized the importance of the discovery. The age of Granton's black shale is known quite accurately; it formed as silt on the bottom of the great lake that covered the Jersey meadows 175 million years ago. In that dim age, the famous flying reptiles, the pterosaurs, had not yet evolved. Yet here was a reptile equipped with something like wings. Dr. Colbert took the fossil to the laboratory, where skilled technicians spent months clearing shale from around the delicate bones...