Where does Coal Come From??

Back in December, Talk of the Nation did a segment on Christopher Lloyd's new book "What on Earth Evolved" which discusses the 100 most important species in the Earth's evolution. This is the part that really stuck out to me:

CONAN: And speaking of forests, there is a species of which I had never heard called lepidodendron

Mr. LLOYD: Yeah.

CONAN: which is - I perhaps put in Irish. But I'm sure it's got an apostrophe there after the O. But anyway, this was a species of tree which vanished a long time ago, and only flowered at the very top and once in its life.

Mr. LLOYD: That's absolutely right. And to think about it, actually, bamboos only flower once in their life. So it is a sort of ancient habit of some plants. But the lepidodendron tree was amazingly successful. It was the first really, really successful tree that evolved about 320, 350 million years ago. And it would - there were like giant telegraph polls. So they would shoot up incredibly quickly in a race to try and get to a light.

And because they didn't have any branches or leaves on their trunks, but only at the top, they could grow incredibly densely. So they're the most densely packed forests. And then therefore when they die, they would fall over and they'd all fall over on top of each other and they'd never properly rot because there were layers and layers of these trees in the forests and the air could never really get to them.

So as the sediment built up and as the forests were flooded, as the seas rose and things, all these deposits of these trees got pressed and mashed up in the geological process of the earth, and have become for us the most valuable commodity, really, over the last 200 or 300 years to man, and that is coal. So most of the coal deposits, the best coal deposits, actually, are the ancient remains of lepidodendron trees.

CONAN: So think about West Virginia or Kentucky or parts of Wyoming covered

Mr. LLOYD: You've got it.

CONAN: in all these trees.

Mr. LLOYD: Absolutely.

So, think about that the next time people argue that we "have enough" or will "find more" coal (or any other natural resource for that matter - like oil). Get it: coal is made from a telephone pole sized bamboo-like tree, that grew thick as thieves in West Virginia 350 MILLION years ago. No biggie.