David Campbell wrote on Thursday, July 25, 2002 5:02 PM
>A couple of additional considerations:
>
>Not all plant biomass makes it into coal. Various organisms,
>including certain bacteria, protists, and fungi can consume wood, and
>many others can digest less durable plant tissue such as leaves.
>Lignitized wood from the Mesozoic and Cenozoic commonly is full of
>holes from shipworms and other wood-boring bivalves (which have
>symbiotic bacteria and protists to digest the cellulose). This also
>raises the question of how long the wood had to sit exposed on the
>seafloor for the shipworms to make their holes, which can raise
>problems for flood geology models.
This consumption also raises the quantity of plant matter which must grow in
the first place to account for the coal we see. Thus in the calculation I
presented the other day, if half of all wood is eaten, one must have 2
world's full of tropical rain forests.
>A variety of coal deposits are not currently economical to mine and
>may be omitted from some databases. Don't forget the Triassic rift
>valley coals in the Atlantic coast states and the Cretaceous coals in
>the Plains (in Canada and the U.S.) in calculating total volume.
The quantity of coal in John Hunt's work is all in the world, including thin
seams. The BP Statistical Review of World Energy reports that the reserves
of coal are around 1/15 of the total quantity Hunt reports. For those who
don't know what reserves are, they are the amount one can economically dig
out of the ground.
glenn
see http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/dmd.htm
for lots of creation/evolution information
anthropology/geology/paleontology/theology\
personal stories of struggle
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