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Spectacular Fossil Forests Found In US Coalmine
Smivs passes along a report up on the BBC about the fossil forests found in coal mines in Illinois. "The [US-UK] group reported one discovery last year, but has since identified a further five examples. The ancient vegetation — now turned to rock — is visible in the ceilings of mines covering thousands of hectares. These were among the first forests to evolve on the planet, [according to] Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang... 'These are the largest fossil forests found anywhere in the world at any point in geological time. It is quite extraordinary to find a fossil landscape preserved over such a vast area; and we are talking about an area the size of [the British city of] Bristol.' The forests grew just a few million years apart some 300 million years ago; and are now stacked one on top of another."
Cities of Bristol is now an accepted measurement of area? And here I thought I was paying attention to SI conventions. How many libraries of congre
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
are the places where there is both coal and limestone. The same place that was once a forest that got fossilized then got covered by the sea. Scratch through the limestone and you find fossilized sea shells etc. Go deeper and you find fossilized twigs and leaves.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
A hectare is fine, too.
What I don't understand from the article (yes I RTFA) is why this fossil forrest needs to be viewed from below? Was all the commercially interesting coal beneath the tree fossils, or is there a scientific reason to approach it bottom up?
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Let's burn it!
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Some images better than the crappy one with TFA. Or just go to the source: http://www.isgs.uiuc.edu/research/coal/fossil-forest/
The GP post asked about "libraries of congre," clearly a misspelling of "libraries of conger" as in [[daggertooth pike conger]], a species of fish. So we're really talking upwards of 7,000 libraries of conger rather than 47 libraries of congress.
My dad and grandfather used to work in the coal mines in the southwest Virginia and eastern Kentucky area. They used to find bits of fossilized plants all the time.
Though I doubt they found anything as largescale as what is presented in the article, my grandfather did bring out of a mine a fossil tree trunk/root system that he placed in his front yard. I very distinctly remember playing on it as a child, it was quite large.
You realize, don't you, that you're suggesting that coal seams have been laid down within the past 100 years? Thinking about it rationally would suggest to you that these items were dropped in the coal mine by miners, not laid down along with the coal. Or how do you propose they got there, to be found many meters below ground?
And the brethren went away edified.
See here: http://www.isgs.uiuc.edu/research/coal/fossil-forest/fossil-forest.shtml
http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/35/5/415 There's the link to the abstract from their work last year.
Is this not a big enough story for US news companies to cover?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
The absence of theism is not an absence of faith. For that you want agnosticism. Atheists require faith to believe that there is no God, and nothing else outside their perceived world. In reality, this viewpoint requires more faith than any religion, because all religions offer "proof" that they are true. Not so for atheism.
This one is a few miles from my house.
n 1884, coal miners working the Black Diamond mine in New Straitsville, southeastern Ohio, went on strike when the Columbus and Hocking Coal and Iron Company cut their pay from 60 cents a ton to 40 cents. Legend has it that other miners, unhappy with the work stoppage, loaded several coal cars with oil-soaked firewood and rolled them into the mine.
It's hard to imagine what benefit they anticipated, but I bet they never dreamt of what resulted.
For the next 122 years and counting, the underground fire, called the Devil's Oven, has burned in the coals seams around the Monday Creek area. At times the fires have been prominent and close to the surface. In fact, in the 1930's tourists came to the area to watch their guides cook meals over smoking holes in the ground.
During the depression, a WPA crew was dispatched to the area to fight the fire, with indifferent success.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources estimates that to date the Devil's Oven has consumed 276 million tons of coal, or 20 square miles of the black gold. Today the fire is burning about 40 feet underground... from blog of Tom Barlow
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
American or European football?
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Greetings folks,
I'm Scott Elrick from the Illinois State Geological Survey, one of the researchers involved in the original discovery. Here's a little background:
* This current story is an extension of a story from a year ago. When the story broke, I popped onto Slashdot to answer questions - http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=232903&cid=18936603 (ignore the misspellings in those posts!)
* As a result of the publicity, I used some of the guts of my postings above to put together this webpage: http://www.isgs.uiuc.edu/research/coal/fossil-forest/fossil-forest.shtml I tried to make a 'general public' kind of site that covers most of the basics and posted all of the pictures we took.
* From the guts of the webpage, I put together a magazine article for 'Outdoor Illinois' on the discovery. Here's a PDF (direct link) of the article - http://www.isgs.uiuc.edu/research/coal/fossil-forest/Outdoor-IL-art.pdf
* By the end of the year we made it into the top 100 stories of 2007 in Discover magazine - http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jan/fossils-of-a-300-million-year-old-forest-found
* There should be an article coming out in Smithsonian magazine about the discovery in a few months time.
Now to the current news.
Our colleague Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang of the University of Bristol, UK is heading up a multi year research effort to examine the Desmoinesian - Missourian boundary in the Middle Penn. Howard, Bill DiMichele of the Smithsonian Institute, John Nelson and myself of the ISGS, Isabel Montañez of UC Davis and Neil Tabor of SMU will all be collaborating to work out the paleobotanical, sedimentologic, CO2, and climate history of this large scale climate transition. Really this is more an announcement of further research than of results!
As flat as Illinois is, we do have a pretty good record of this transitional period Rocks in Illinois? Who knew!
Cheers!
p.s. I covered a fair amount of ground in my previous postings last year in terms of answering questions. I'll pop back later this evening and see if any more pop up though.
"Bristol City" is also cockney rhyming slang.
There was a long time (like millions of years?) between the forests getting buried. So it could even have been a volcano erupting repeatedly every million years. Or a river where "mother of all floods" would happen with periodic climate shifts (like Milankovitch cycles), causing thousands of years worth of mud deposits to be suddenly released. Huge glacial lakes bursting are one source of huge sudden floods, and they can be triggered both by climate change and by volcanoes.