Earth's Cooking is Mostly Dynamic 🌎 The Story of How Ancient Plants Become Coal 📚

Coal was originally fluffy plants

When you hear the word coal, don't you get the impression of something black, hard, and somewhat silent?
But if you trace its origins, it has a surprisingly gentle background 😲

Originally, it was the fluff of the forest

The raw material for coal is the plants that grew in ancient forests.
Giant ferns, tree-like grasses, and fluffy leaves.

Isn't it a bit funny that the starting point is the exact opposite of the black coal you're imagining (・ω・)

You can't eat it, but it's basically a salad

The plants of that time piled up in environments where they were hard to decompose even after dying.
There was a lot of water, little oxygen, and they didn't fully rot.

So what happened as a result?

・Plants
・Plants
・Plants

piled up in many layers.

This is basically
a giant salad made by the Earth 🤣
There's no dressing, but
it's packed with plenty of pressure 🥗

Compression, compression, and even more compression

Millions and tens of millions of years of time, along with the weight from above, are added to it.
It gets added.

Squeeze
Squeeze tight
Squeeeeeeeze

What used to be leaves lost their original form,
the fluff disappeared,
and it finally turned into black, hard coal.

In other words, coal is
like an ancient plant compressed preserved food.
Though the preservation period is a bit too long 😄

Earth's cooking is mostly dynamic

Without using fire or knives, it just piles up, presses, and waits.

Earth's cooking methods are always simple, and they generally don't know when to stop.

After learning that, doesn't your impression of coal change just a little bit? 🤣

How do you feel about it?

Is coal just a burning rock?

Or does it make you want to look at it thinking that it's a forest from the distant past, tightly locked away in time?

From fluffy to this. When you think about it that way, Earth's preparation is truly something else. 🌍

Official USGS resources on the properties and use of coal:
https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1143/html/text.html