Carbon - the Great Plastician

摘要

Global warming today is occurring as a result of our collective burning of vast amounts of the sequestered carbon of a bygone age. At that time vast forests of equisetum-like plants covered the earth. We can imagine how they once grew out of the earthand in the course of one year attained heights of a hundred feet or more and had girths greater than the largest of our present day forest trees and then in the autumn died back and decayed like our present day eq-uisetum plants. If they did this each year for thousands of years, we can begin to understand how it came to be that such vast amounts of organic matter could accumulate and form the coal measures. The decay and building up of layer upon layer of carbonaceous deposit would suggest a growing medium that was at least partly waterlogged — an environment in which soil and humus formation would have been almost non-existent and for the plants growing at the time unnecessary. It is believed that our oil reserves came about in a similar way through the anaerobic decay of countless animal remains. Nothing akin to the powerful life of the coal forests or the pools of teeming creatures that existed when oil deposits were created, can be found on the earth today. The earth has grown up. It is now older, far more slow moving and probably much more rigid than it was in that ancient Palaeozoic period.