The great oil and gas formations that U.S. shale drillers thrive on have reportedly been traced back to volcanic eruptions from the time of the dinosaurs, over 100 million years ago. In the Cretaceous time, the era of the dinosaurs, an enormous flare-up of volcanic activity spewed ash with high levels of carbon dioxide and nutrients that helped more organic carbon to be buried in the earth, generating an abundance of hydrocarbon source rocks from Texas to Montana, Rice University geologists said in a new study published in Nature Publishing’s online journal Scientific Reports. There have always been hints that volcano eruptions in dinosaur times could be linked to shale oil and gas resources, said study lead author Cin-Ty Lee, professor and chair of Rice’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. Now the study by Lee, graduate student Hehe Jiang, and Rice undergraduates Elli Ronay, Jackson Stiles and […]