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
-- *** Dr. A.D. Karve Trustee & Founder President, Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI) _______________________________________________ Gasification mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/gasification_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Gasifiers, News and Information see our web site: http://gasifiers.bioenergylists.org/
