
The Origin of Most Coal on Earth (2016) - lordnacho
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01/07/the-fantastically-strange-origin-of-most-coal-on-earth/
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bitslayer
So the trees had evolved, but the bacteria had not caught on yet. "It’s a
curious mismatch. Food to eat but no eaters to eat it." In a few million
years, they might be saying the same thing about plastic.

~~~
mfoy_
Sooner than you think: [https://www.sciencealert.com/new-plastic-munching-
bacteria-c...](https://www.sciencealert.com/new-plastic-munching-bacteria-
could-fuel-a-recycling-revolution)

~~~
StavrosK
Oooh I can't wait to have my blender rot!

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CharlesColeman
Maybe we could genetically engineer a new kind of tree with undigestible wood,
to replicate this era to deliberately sequester carbon.

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garmaine
Plastic.

~~~
crimsonalucard
So by using biodegradable packaging I am contributing to global warming? Oh
the irony.

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homonculus1
No, biodegradable is carbon-neutral. Plastic itself is carbon-neutral although
it's a byproduct of carbon-polluting oil. We'd have to make plastic out of
atmospheric carbon for it to have any sequestering effect.

~~~
crimsonalucard
If biodegrade-able products are from carbon based life, and carbon based life
contains carbon, and biology breaks down biodegrade-able products, wouldn't
breaking down something that contains carbon be releasing carbon into the air?
And wouldn't that be NOT carbon neutral.

~~~
homonculus1
Carbon neutral means the carbon that gets released at the end was initially
taken out of the atmosphere, not the ground.

If you burn a piece of paper it's carbon neutral because the tree absorbed
that carbon from the air. If you burn a piece of plastic you're adding carbon
that used to be sequestered below the surface.

~~~
parsnips
How long must an item be buried before burning it loses its carbon neutrality?

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lopmotr
If you first ask why CO2 in the atmosphere is a problem, then you'll find the
answer. It's the same time scale at which the change in atmospheric CO2 is a
problem. It's only a problem because it's changing rapidly. It would be OK if
it happened slowly enough for species to adapt or at least for human activity
to adapt without too much disruption to our daily lives. Ultimately, it's
rapid disruption to our daily lives we don't want. We don't want to have to
move somewhere else, have less spending power of our wages, get a different
job, or change our eating habits. But if it happens gradually generation by
generation, so we hardly notice it, then it'll be OK.

~~~
garmaine
This is very much not true. Look at Venus, which was (we believe) subject to a
runaway greenhouse event. Also, the Permian period ("Snowball Earth"). Climate
change can be catastrophic whether it occurs fast or slowly.

~~~
crimsonalucard
But he has a point. The real answer is more complicated. Slow change gives
natural selection several generations to evolve a complex solution to the
problem and our minds the time to come up with a technological solution.

Life exists within the boundaries of available sunlight and liquid water.
Changes that occur slowly within these boundaries don't necessarily have to be
catastrophic. However if the changes exceed these boundaries whether fast or
slow then yes the change will indeed be catastrophic.

Venus possibly has no liquid water and snowball earth doesn't have much water
either, hence the catastrophe.

~~~
garmaine
Venus had oceans at the time. They boiled off. The Permian Earth had oceans
too, just ice capped ones. Microbial life and the simplest algae-like life
survived, but that’s it.

I just don’t think it’s all that correct or useful to say the equivalent of
“life will adapt” when life has never adapted to changes this fast, and we are
hurtling towards changes so extreme as to wipe out complex life entirely.

~~~
crimsonalucard
As long as water and sunlight are available, we're good.

~~~
garmaine
Venesians, if any existed, would disagree.

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crimsonalucard
On earth there is life capable of existing in water far hotter than boiling.
Not little bacterias either. Actual multicellular animals.

Catastrophic change will leave pockets of deviants in some dark corners of the
earth that will remain protected somewhat. These deviants will go on to
populate the world.

There was one such catastrophic change that happened before. A meteor. Wiped
out an entire class of creatures called dinosaurs, now replaced with mammals.
Mammals at this time lived as tiny rodents underground.

~~~
garmaine
There is no life anywhere on Earth that is able to survive 90 atm and 500 deg
C, like the surface of Venus. And fwiw, the asteroid impact that killed the
dinosaurs is one of the milder mass extinction events in Earth's history. We
are on trajectories in excess of those that predated the worst mass die-offs
in Earth's history, and more resemble the lead-up to Venusian conditions.

~~~
crimsonalucard
You can't maintain liquid water at those temps. I don't think we are on
trajectory for Venus like weather.

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jandrese
The point about the long thin trunks with almost no root system is
interesting. Were they growing between the logs of previously fallen trees and
being supported by them? Maybe they look so spindly today because they didn't
have to provide most of their lateral stability?

And of course they only grow in hot climates because pulling all of that
carbon out of the atmosphere would have caused the planet to cool down and
nothing would survive the continually freezing conditions closer to the poles.

~~~
wallace_f
Wouldn't there be little-to-no soil? So their roots would be anchoring in rock
AFAIK?

~~~
jandrese
The soil would be peat I think. Leafy parts of plants would decay, just the
woody parts would remain. Probably pretty thin soil though, hence the shallow
roots.

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abainbridge
So trees used to be non-biodegradable. This makes me wonder what would happen
if you took a load of plastic bottles and subjected them to geological amounts
of pressure, heat and time.

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dsfyu404ed
Considering that plastic is hydrocarbons already you'd probably just get
different hydrocarbons.

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seiferteric
I have heard this theory several years ago but at the time I thought it was
considered a sort of fringe theory, has that changed? Is this pretty well
accepted now?

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emmelaich
Pretty sure this is the main theory and has been for a very long time.

There is an alternative (non-biological) theory for hydrocarbon production but
not sure whether many take it seriously.

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Ensorceled
One of my classmates in high school Geography put forward the alternative
theory that God put the coal there for us to use but the Devil added fake
evidence so that the coal would appear to come from ancient plants and thus
confuse us about how old the world is.

Our teacher asked for a show of hands and 5 out of our 25-30 student class
agreed with this theory.

~~~
TallGuyShort
Why is there so much stock in specifically a very literal reading of the most
modern translations of Genesis? Even as a religious person, I don't see where
they're coming from. Arguments to be made about Genesis originally referring
to "creation" (ex nihilo) vs "organization" are already pretty weak, what
reason do we then have to assume that despite all the evidence of an ancient
Earth that it was literal Earth-days, and that the idea it was literal Earth-
days is somehow so important to God's plan that the Devil would fake evidence
of fossils to try and get people to think it was NOT Earth-days?

~~~
crimsonalucard
As a religious person what is the justification for a non literal
interpretation of the Bible? Was there a commandment that says God wanted you
to interpret that way? Why does God want his messages to be non literal
instead of literal?

Perhaps each person is given a choice. You have three. Interpret the Bible
literally, interpret the Bible symbolically or not even play the game and
realize that no interpretation of the Bible is correct because the book is
just as fictive as the Koran or any other holy book from an ancient religion.

How would a human reconcile with their beliefs and how they were raised with
reality as it exists around them. Science says that no one can turn water into
wine, the Bible says that it can. Logically speaking the Bible is wrong. But
when I've spent years reading the Bible and my entire identity is built around
religion my only option is to say that the Bible is not to be interpreted
literally. I must create a lie that validates reality and validates my
identity.

Also how would I know that I'm lying to myself? If I or anyone I knew was
doing this form of psychological self manipulation, how would I know?

You can't until you read this.

~~~
TallGuyShort
>> As a religious person what is the justification for a non literal
interpretation of the Bible?

The fact that there are parts that are explicitly given as being symbolic.
This is actually addressed in the New Testament when Christ explains that he
teaches in parables because he's speaking directly to a specific level of
understanding.

>> Science says that no one can turn water into wine

No, science does not know how to turn water into wine. There was once a point
where science did not know how to turn one element into another element, but
it would have been incorrect to say that science had said no one could do it -
that's confusing science with what people think. If there's a being that
created the universe, I'd imagine that can pretty much do what they want with
molecules.

>> If I or anyone I knew was doing this form of psychological self
manipulation, how would I know?

How do you ever know that about anything? You trust your senses, but you have
no more justification for doing so than people who have had intense spiritual
experiences do for following up on those experiences. I view the intense
spiritual experiences I've had as being a sense - it's no more rational for
people to expect me to ignore what I've felt than it is for me to expect you
to do the same things if you haven't felt that.

~~~
crimsonalucard
>>>The fact that there are parts that are explicitly given as being symbolic.
This is actually addressed in the New Testament when Christ explains that he
teaches in parables because he's speaking directly to a specific level of
understanding.

You missed the symbolism here. What you thought he meant was actually
symbolism for an entirely different meaning. There's about 4 layers of
indirection here meaning that each symbolic representation is in itself a
symbolic representation of something else. This happens on four distinct
levels. Reinterpreting this statement the correct way can change the entire
interpretation of the bible.

~~~
TallGuyShort
I don't follow what you're saying. Are you facetiously parodying your
impression of religion? If so, let's just be clear that of the two of us,
you're the one preventing a rational conversation and stereotyping me based on
what you've seen other say, something most people hate when religions do it.

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your-nanny
I hadn't known about the microbe end of the story. I'm kinda disappointed. I
had long imagined that the inevitable process of fossil fuel generation and
accumulation would eventually turn the earth into a flaming tarball, and it
was those crazy humans who finally figured out how to tar -xvf the sucker to
the anthropocene.

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tempguy9999
I can't see much discussion of the nature of these plants and seems to miss
some interesting stuff (unless I missed it), so here's my recollection from
reading around.

The 'trees' were club mosses, not trees. Moss as in moss in the usual sense,
except got big. One common sort was lepidodendron
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepidodendron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepidodendron)).
Note the distinct scale pattern on the trunks.

Absolutely fascinatingly to me, the descendents of these may still exist as
quillwort
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoetes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoetes)).

~~~
kragen
"Tree" is a paraphyletic taxon; today you have conifer trees, angiosperm
trees, cycad trees, and so on, all of which are more closely related to non-
tree plants than to each other. Even among angiosperms, you have lots of
different trees that are more closely related to non-trees than to each other
— a black locust tree is more closely related to a soybean plant than it is to
an apple tree. So there's no reason to claim that a club-moss tree isn't a
tree. Bamboo, maybe you would have a point, but not club-moss trees.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree)

~~~
tempguy9999
Very good points, thanks. I know that legumes fall into their own group so if
a locust bean is a legume then naturally it must be more closely related to
soybean vines than an apple - but I just never thought of it that way. A
rather new perspective.

Personally I wouldn't class a cycad as a tree, nor a date palm, and I wouldn't
call a lepidodendron one either, but after a bit of reflection I've no good
reason to take that view, so thanks for all this!

~~~
kragen
Note that “dendron” is usually translated to English as “tree” but of course
that's a pretty weak argument—there's no requirement that words in different
languages denote precisely coextensive categories.

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teepo
The author is Robert Krulwich, co-host of "Radiolab". Try not to imagine his
voice while reading it. Here's a related piece:
[https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-
tree](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-tree)

~~~
istjohn
I knew I knew that name from somewhere.

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punnerud
Could this also be why a lot of the dinosaurs died out? There was no
bacteria’s, so the food was abundant until we got the bacteria. Not only
abundant, but it never got bad. So the biggest ‘eater’ was the winner.

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HillaryBriss
I've heard that the arrival of fungi on the scene was what ended this ancient
coal formation process. But this article says it was bacteria living in insect
guts. I wonder which -- the fungi or these bacteria -- is responsible for more
wood decomposition.

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La-ang
Imagine having Trichonympha as pets? Of course you cant see them, but if you
set up the video camera right with the proper lens and display the view on a
16 inch screen in the living room :D Wait, that's a great idea!

