The story of how coal was formed .. per the Natl Geographic:
Somewhere I have some pieces of shale I pulled from the roof of a coal seam with the fern like leaf imprints on them.
The story is that bacteria hadn't evolved to digest the lignin and cellulose of ancient trees so they piled on top of one another, pressed themselves into peat and eventually, after being buried long enough, into coal.
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/07/the-fantastically-strange-origin-of-most-coal-on-earth/
.... But when those trees died, the bacteria, fungi, and other microbes that today would have chewed the dead wood into smaller and smaller bits were missing, or as Ward and Kirschvink put it, they “were not yet present.”
Where Are They?
Bacteria existed, of course, but microbes that could ingest lignin and cellulose—the key wood-eaters—had yet to evolve. It’s a curious mismatch. Food to eat but no eaters to eat it. And so enormous loads of wood stayed whole. “Trees would fall and not decompose back,” write Ward and Kirschvink.
Instead, trunks and branches would fall on top of each other, and the weight of all that heavy wood would eventually compress those trees into peat and then, over time, into coal. Had those bacteria been around devouring wood, they’d have broken carbon bonds, releasing carbon and oxygen into the air, but instead the carbon stayed in the wood.
..... wood-eating bacteria. By not being there 350 million years ago, and by not arriving for another 60 million years, giant seams of black coal now warm us, light us, and muck up our atmosphere. ....
Funny that flavobacteria containing coding to produce nylonase show up, or at least is found, as soon as humans begin making nylon (which did not previously exist!). But trees didn't rot for millions of years because the bacteria to digest their "building blocks" didn't evolve.
It's not that there was any plan to store energy underground for us to dig up and use or anything. That would be an inappropriate thought. |
