Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Let's burn it!
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
The coal was produced primarily by rotting leaves and soil, which yes, would have been under the trees.
So you have a layer of petrified leaves and trees and a layer of coal beneath it. They take out the coal and you get a really big long cave, where you can look up at the bottom of the fossil bed.
Cool stuff. Now I'm waiting patiently for someone to mention the global warming comment.
Duh,
47 libraries of congress to a Bristol measured at 47 degrees Reaumur 83 furlongs above knee level,
Man, I've know that for about a microcentury.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
global warming comment
Anyone with worldly knowledge knows that Bristol was the standard unit of measurement for area within the British Empire for over 200 years. It seems I'll have to break it down for you ignorant Americans:
Bristol has an area of 1,184,832,000 square feet (source)
The Library of Congress has an area of 2,100,000 square feet (source)
Therefore 1 Bristol (and TFA's fossilised forest) == 564.2 Libraries of Congress
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
It depends on how pregnant that Bristol is.
OK, bad bad taste. My coat's the one full of shot.
Some images better than the crappy one with TFA. Or just go to the source: http://www.isgs.uiuc.edu/research/coal/fossil-forest/
well, finding that in a very short period of time, of natural global warming, that rainforests are replaced with giant ferns is a little disheartening. http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
this is a wonderful find, oh and BTW the area where the coal was mined was actually a peat bog, that turned into a forest in the carboniferous period, then turned into sea several times and then back into a forest, and was also a ferny weedy place. most likely earthquakes from changes in plate tectonics played a huge role in how the land mass changed, from being above land, below land, and the erosion of nearby mountains provided the silt to cover the land when it was above ground.
so no the coal was not the result of the forest, although it may have added slightly to the coal, when it was submersed, most coal is formed from wetlands where vastly more biomass concentrates and is preserved from decaying due to water covering it thus preventing microbes from getting the oxygen to decay the plant matter. if you want coal you look for places where the water was stagnant like prehistoric wetlands, or former continental shelf areas.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
And how many firkins of beer could you keep at 45 deg. F for a fortnight assuming an ambient 70 deg temp assuming that each dram (weight, not fluid) of coal has 1373 btus of energy. Please state all simplifying assumptions. Keep 3 sig. figs.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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
Answer: 0.000
Simplifying Assumption: I drank it all.
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
Nonsense - you simply need analytical ability and a basic grasp of logic.
Using your "logic", you would likewise require proof in order to believe that there is no Santa Claus. In fact, NOT believing in Santa Claus would actually require more faith than believing in Him, since the TV shows Him to us all the time, and we even see Him at the mall during the Christmas season.
Also wrong. Agnosticism is the way you approach a problem, not an answer to a problem. If you're agnostic about a question, that means that you accept that it can never be 100% proven or disproved. It doesn't answer the question of whether you think there is a god, though. It just means that your willing to consider both possibilities, and weigh them in a fair manner.
Technically speaking, I'm agnostic about the existence of Santa Claus. I can never prove for certain that he DOESN'T exist. But that doesn't mean that the chances of him existing or not existing are 50/50. I can use logic, observation, and deductive reasoning to come to the most likely conclusion, and I can even assign it a rough probability.
In the end, everything does come down to belief, since no question can be answered with 100% certainty. But there is a WORLD of difference between belief based on scientific observations and critical thinking, and a belief based on blind faith.
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.