If we can dig and mine up coal, does that mean that it was once a tree that burned down?
In: 245
No, it didn’t burn.
In the carboniferous period 360 Mya to 300 Mya is when the plants that became coal lived. These were plants that lived in swamps. Bacteria and fungus had not yet evolved to eat these plant corpses. The dead plants piled up, landed in water, got covered in sediment, and over the next few million years it got compressed into a solid chunk of carbon that we call coal today. It also has lots of impurities from the ground.
Charcoal is different. Charcoal is what is created when you heat up wood in a low oxygen environment. The hydrogen based compounds in the wood evaporate out, leaving behind a very porous chunk of carbon. Industrially produced char coal also usually has lots of oils left over in it from the wood.
Oil was also produced in the carboniferous period, but rather than plants, it’s from the corpses of algae and plankton that build up on the ocean floor, was buried by sediment, and squeezed into a mix of hydrocarbons.
Latest Answers