Spectacular Fossil Forests Found In US Coalmine 197
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."
Note on Units (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Note on Units (Score:5, Funny)
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.
no, no (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:no, no, no (Score:2)
>clearly a misspelling of "libraries of conger" as in [[daggertooth pike conger]]
You've used the wrong collective noun for such an aggregation of conger. According to this [rinkworks.com] it should be a swarm of [conger] eels. They just don't seem very bookish to me. :-) They are tasty, however.
Re:Note on Units (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Note on Units (Score:5, Funny)
Answer: 0.000
Simplifying Assumption: I drank it all.
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This must be obscure measurements day.
Re:Note on Units (Score:5, Funny)
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 [wikipedia.org])
The Library of Congress has an area of 2,100,000 square feet (source [nps.gov])
Therefore 1 Bristol (and TFA's fossilised forest) == 564.2 Libraries of Congress
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Awe common, you guys are too rough.
Parent had a somewhat vaguely pertinent comment.
You know Seagate named a line of harddrives Barracuda; just so they'd have a bunch of jokes on hand when someone asked about missing bites.
Here's to hoping I used the ; properly, probably not, since I'm just guessing.
Re:Note on Units (Score:5, Funny)
It depends on how pregnant that Bristol is.
OK, bad bad taste. My coat's the one full of shot.
Re:Note on Units (Score:4, Funny)
My coat's the one full of shot.
Unfortunately, Bristol's baby's daddy's latex coat was not full of shot. That's why she is now pregnant.
My apartment is approximately 675 nano-Britols (Score:2)
My apartment is approximately 675 nano-Britols.
Football Fields (Score:2)
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Old timer navy reference (Score:2)
ARGHHH! Pirates would care a lot about tackling a ship set up to Bristol Standards (or in Bristol Shape-don't know the correct term...can some Limey Navy buff help me out here?)
Bristol Standards/Shape meant that the ship was set up correctly, top of the line, all shipshape-ready to kick ass.
At one time, it meant your ship was 'Ready For Freddy...Bring it on!'
I think I learned this on Star Trek NG when Picard was explaining it to Riker on a holodeck excursion!
Correct me if I'm wrong (HaHa! Can't castrate me,
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It's Bristol Fashion, I believe. See http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/ship-shape%20and%20Bristol%20fashion.html [phrases.org.uk]
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"And here I thought I was paying attention to SI conventions."
"Hectare" is not an SI unit.
There is no "thousands of hectares," there is only "tens of millions of square meters," or "thousands of square hectometers," if you prefer.
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I hope this guy's address isn't anywhere near Switzerland...
Breasts! (Score:2, Informative)
"Bristol City" is also cockney rhyming slang.
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http://www.simonkelk.co.uk/sizeofwales.html [simonkelk.co.uk] may help.
What I find more interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What I find more interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
The top of Mount Everest is partially limestone [wikipedia.org].
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It's because it was all covered with water at one point.
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Birmingham, Alabama. There is an expressway cut through Red Mountain, and the various layers--coal and limestone, but also iron ore--are beautifully exposed. They had a wonderful museum there for a while, mostly for kids but fascinating for everyone. You could go along an elevated walkway and see fossils from all the levels. The museum seems to have closed, but even wandering around somebody's back yard there can yield a pocket full of small treasures. I recall sitting on someone's stone patio one time and
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Also prevalent between Joplin and Springfield, MO. Especially on the Springfield end of that stretch.
I never thought to check out fossils though. Usually I was just passing through.
Ten Thousand Square Meters (Score:3, Funny)
A hectare is fine, too.
why looking at the ceiling? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:why looking at the ceiling? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:why looking at the ceiling? (Score:5, Funny)
global warming comment
Re:why looking at the ceiling? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [geocraft.com]
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.
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Cool stuff. Now I'm waiting patiently for someone to mention the global warming comment.
Um, you just did.
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As the oceans begin to transgress (the 50-cent geologist term for sea level rise), the existing forest is quickly buried and you end up with a snapshot of the forest remaining. After removing all the coal, you end up with a cave where you look up to the interesting part. Well, interesting for me, since I'm a paleontologist.
Interestingly, this work is only done because the coal mining company is really, re
Nice Catch (Score:2)
"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."
Without the edit, I may have thought it was a reference to someone else [imageshack.us]...
Great! (Score:5, Funny)
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but do fossilized witches float?
Re:Great! (Score:5, Interesting)
This one since 1884 (Score:5, Informative)
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
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Where's the oxygen coming from? I would have thought that the fire would suffocate itself very quickly.
Burning limestone? Maybe we will. (Score:2)
Some better images (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Some better images (Score:4, Interesting)
"The funny thing about atheists is that most of them will never understand the irony of their faith."
Atheism is merely the absence of theism.
Anything else a person may attribute to their non-theism or use to explain it is their problem/baggage, but it isn't atheism. Atheism is a "faith" like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Re:Some better images (Score:5, Insightful)
Gaah, I'm really quite sick of this mantra. For one thing.. it's a mantra. That does not make sense.
For another, if you put as much effort into not collecting stamps as most of the atheists on slashdot put into not believing in god, people would be suggesting support groups for your aphilatelism problem.
Re:Some better images (Score:4, Insightful)
"Gaah, I'm really quite sick of this mantra."
Then be sick of it, but it is still accurate. One may be theism-free quite easily. One may also defend their right to not be imposed upon by the agendas of the superstitious, and as superstitions are vigorous they sometimes require vigorous opposition.
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Re:Some better images (Score:5, Funny)
Fine, how about a new mantra? If atheism and religion were sex ....
Atheism would be like masturbation - you know you're there by yourself, but hell, you're having a good time!
Religion would be like masturbating with a happy face drawn on your hand - it's still only you, but you like pretending that you're not alone.
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That happens when you replace religion with an oppressive pseudo-religious personality cult, like in North Korea. Then you end up with everyone trying to stop the government from raping them, by screwing everyone else.
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No partner. This is Slashdot, remember?
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Gaah, I'm really quite sick of this mantra. For one thing.. it's a mantra. That does not make sense.
Actually it does. Faith is believe in something for which there is insufficient evidence, not believing in something for which there is insufficient evidence does not require faith.
For another, if you put as much effort into not collecting stamps as most of the atheists on slashdot put into not believing in god, people would be suggesting support groups for your aphilatelism problem.
I tried to believe in God when I was younger, I really did, but the evidence was so overwhelming that I finally accepted that there was no god.
Not believing in God is very easy for me. Theism, when I tried it, was extremely difficult for all the contradictions I had to ignore.
However, one place I do expend some effort is going ou
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Perhaps. But when was the last time you heard someone describe themselves as an aphilatelist? anumismatist? What about "area man" who "doesn't watch television?"
You may have managed to avoid it, but the fact is that many who think they do not, have a religion, and it is none. They are evangelical, they have dogma, they demonize those who are not of the faith. They even have priests with vestments: A white lab coat.
Not doing something can be just as intense as doing it, only with 61.8% more smug.
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Perhaps. But when was the last time you heard someone describe themselves as an aphilatelist? anumismatist? What about "area man" who "doesn't watch television?"
Theism has always been the default state for our human societies. Therefore a special label is useful to differentiate people. That doesn't make it a faith, it just makes it slightly unusual. I don't go around thinking "I'm an atheist!", but if someone questions me about religion it's a useful label.
You may have managed to avoid it, but the fact is that many who think they do not, have a religion, and it is none. They are evangelical, they have dogma, they demonize those who are not of the faith. They even have priests with vestments: A white lab coat.
Militant atheists are certainly more more vocal about arguing with religion, and some do go so far as making somewhat exaggerated generalization about theists (though not nearly as much as some claim). But your
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For another, if you put as much effort into not collecting stamps as most of the atheists on slashdot put into not believing in god, people would be suggesting support groups for your aphilatelism problem.
Well, imagine if there were people who were trying to actively convert you to a stamp collector or at least force you to life your life so it won't offend the stamp collectors... Would you put any effort into not collecting stamps then, or would you just submit to the tyranny of stamp collectors?
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I'd get on with doing whatever I want to do, and just ignore the stamp collectors. Who cares what they think? And if they say I really really really have to collect stamps because it's so great, I'd still ignore them if I'm not interested in stamp collecting. And I'd continue doing whatever I wanted to do. Suppose it was gardening. If somebody asked me what hobbies I enjoyed, I'd say "gardening". I might even say that I was a gardener. I wouldn't go around telling everybody that I am an "anti-stamp-collector" and getting into never-ending stupid arguments with stamp collectors. I'd just ignore them, because I don't care about stamp collecting. I like gardening. I'm a gardener.
And I'd never talk about stamp collecting again. On the internet, I wouldn't go to a big Stamp Collecting Forum and argue with stamp collectors about how their hobby is so lame and dumb. I wouldn't go to an Anti-Stamp-Collecting Forum and rabbit on about how bad stamp collectors are. I'd go to a big Gardening Forum and talk about gardening, which I like.
Gardening!? Aargh, blasphemer! Sometimes stamps get thrown in to composts and this is a deadly sin! Some liberal stamp collectors would allow you garden in privacy, like if you had high enough fence around your garden, but they're on the slippery slope. All gardening must be forbidden and gardeners thrown into jail (and see how lenient we are, in the olden days of the great inquisition you would have been burned at stake after torture!), before they corrupt our youth.
</hyperbole>
I grant you that t
Atheism requires faith (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Atheism requires faith (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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No one ever believes with complete certainty that something is true. Everyone has doubts. If you want to say that makes everyone agnostic, go ahead. It doesn't mean anything if it applies to everyone.
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Apparently you've never talked to any religious fanatics. Or conspiracy theorists. Or communists :)
It makes rational people agnostic, but you're right, it doesn't really mean anything. It certainly doesn't define a system of belief, or even an opinion on a particular topic. When people identify themselves as being "agnostic", th
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Oh, I've met people who say they believe these things with certainty. But in my experience, the more radically someone defends their belief, the more doubts they have about it themselves.
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Oh, and I've got all those other religious fanatics beat. I'm so serious about my faith that I won't even lie about it.
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My advice; Avoid hell. Throw out your computer and tv, burn your books, move into the woods. Let us sinners enjoy our 80 years like the fools we are... then after the rapture, you'll spend the first billions of billions of years laughing at us all.
Seriously.
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The absence of theism is not an absence of faith. For that you want agnosticism.
That's really a semantic argument, and nothing more. Not everyone defines atheism so narrowly. But if you want to argue, go argue with a dictionary.
In reality, this viewpoint requires more faith than any religion, because all religions offer "proof" that they are true. Not so for atheism.
Huh? I don't believe in invisible unicorns on neptune either, simply for lack of evidence. Does that mean I have "faith" that the invisible
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It's analogy time:
An atheist would say: I don't believe there's life on mars.
A theist would say: I do believe there's life on mars.
An agnostic would say: I don't believe one way or the other.
This is not a semantic argument, nor are these narrow definitions.
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A thiest would say: There are elephants on mars. The reason we have not seen them is they are behind rocks and the studies where done in the wrong places. You can't disprove the exsistance of elephants on mars, so there are elephants on mars.
An agnostic would say: You can't know for certain one way or the
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Care to share that proof? Atheists do not have faith in the belief there is no god, they are skeptics and to date not one individual or organized group of faithful followers of any god have provided a single shred of proof which is compelling evidence of the existence of a god.
Oh, a
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Why fight about the definitions of words? I obviously define atheist to mean someone who believes there is no god. My post doesn't make a whole lot of sense otherwise, does it?
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Yeah I really hate it when peoples understanding of the meaning of words differs from the definitions I've simply made up myself.
Interestingly I definie your nick mosb1000 as idiot, fancy that !
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My complaint is that by trying to argue for the adoption of a different definition you aren't accomplishing anything. You are basically trying to say that I said something that I didn't mean, then arguing against an argument that I never intended to make. It's pointless.
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Person A: "I believe that 499,999 of the 500,000 religions out there are false. I reject their evidence. I accept one of the 500,000 religions, mainly because {I accept their eviden
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The absence of theism is not an absence of faith.
and
In reality, this viewpoint requires more faith than any religion, because all religions offer "proof" that they are true. Not so for atheism.
are two false statements, and the first is largely unimportant. Like any other logical deduction about the world, if there is no reason to think something is true or that it exists, then it is probably false; and so both absence of faith in deities and faith in the absence of deities are both sensible and logical viewpoints. The entirety of science (which uses logic to make statements about the universe around us) is based on this idea. If something doesn't follow from what we [provably] know, and doesn'
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Maybe you were looking for the term faith?
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Yes, that would be more accurate.
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It's interesting that trees that dominated at the time have all but disappeared and left only a handful of diminutive living relatives such as horsetails ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsetail [wikipedia.org] ), which are related to calamites; and Quillwort ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quillwort [wikipedia.org] ), which are related to Lycopsids. We're lucky to have a handful of relatives around after 300 mil years (if human activity doesn't finally finish them off).
I've seen this before (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Stacked forests? (Score:2)
I see a solution for global warming...
Why in a UK News Site (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this not a big enough story for US news companies to cover?
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I think they covered it a year or two ago, actually; it seems familiar.
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This study is being done by the University of Bristol, and was first reported at "the British Association Science Festival in Liverpool".
Word will get around shortly, but it's not at all surprising that the UK press gets the first shot at the story.
Constantly amazed by Earth (Score:2)
I never cease to be amazed by the Earth's ability to record it's own history in the most remarkable detail.
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That's why I'm very interested to see how different these fossils are from modern plants. I'm betting about zilch.
Shut down the coal mine! (Score:2)
As we all know protecting fossils is more important then energy.
Slow, gradual change... out the window (Score:2)
Layers of entire forests do not turn into fossils via slow, gradual change. I'm not trying to ignite any stupid arguments here, but has anyone read of a geological theory that covers such widespread, repeated mudslides or mud bursts?
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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.
I'm one of the geologists involved in the discover (Score:5, Informative)
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 [slashdot.org] (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 [uiuc.edu] 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 [uiuc.edu]
* 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 [discovermagazine.com]
* 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.
Biogenic theory of coal formation reborn (Score:2)
Seems to support biogenic coal formation. Unfortunately in this age of 25 megapixel pocket cameras, the only record we have of these forests is a 433x253 thumbnail.
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I was going to ask for a citation, but a simple Google for "items found in coal" resulted with Impossible Stuff Found In Coal And Rock [tripod.com]
Going from there you'l find more, but its odd that they are (from what ive found) all from the late 1800's/early 1900's... which my scepticism seems to over-ride as just wives-tales sort of stuff... a sort of joke that got taken seriously... or just to make the papers...
Not to say that I necessarily believe that its 300 million years old either, because coal can be made in a
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In this case, the coal has to be older then the trees. Thay's where they get the date.
I can show you links of people claiming to see big foot, ghosts, and angels. That don't make it so.
I mean look at that tripod post.
An unverified find by a 10 year old boy from an unidentified location containing an unidentified bell with unquantified composition claimed to be encased in a material that was believed to be coal.
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Since all these 'finds' are unverified I wouldn't look to hard.
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It's laughable where they come up with these astronomical numbers. Items that have been found in coal seams include bells, shoe soles, toys, spoons, spark plugs just to name a few. Yes they appeared to be "fossilized" in the coal but if we are to believe these guys, that spark plug that was found has been there for 300 million years. Unbelievable.
You're having us on, aren't you? Oh you mischievous rapscallion you! Well played sir, indeed!
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ummmm mud? Pyroclastic flow ?