[Gasification] [Stoves] formation of coal in carboniferous era

[Anand Karve]

All the coal deposits in the world date back to the carboniferous era.
It states in geology textbooks that the earth was covered at that time
by dense forests. The trunks of trees that died piled up on the land
and were converted to coal by some geological process. Even today
there are dense forests in the world, but the dead tree trunks don't
pile up on the forest floor. They get decomposed by the action of
termites, wood borers and some wood rotting fungi. Obviously this did
not happen in the carboniferous era. Some scientists cite the example
of peat formation, which takes place in swamps, under anaerobic
conditions. Drawing an analogy from that process, they claim that the
oxygen content of the atmosphere must have been very low at that time.
Some other scientists refute this claim. They say that if the world
was covered by forests, the photosynthesis of all those trees might
have raised the oxygen level rather than reducing it. I have my own
hypothesis about this. I claim that the organisms that decompose
lignin had not evolved at that time and therefore the lignocellulosic
debris just piled up everywhere, just as discarded plastic does today.
I need a time machine to verify this.
Yours
A.D.Karve

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Dr. A.D. Karve
Trustee & Founder President, Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI)

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