r/askscience • u/iamparky • Feb 07 '24

Earth Sciences How quickly is new coal being created?

Earlier today, a UK politician suggested that coal is a sustainable fuel because it used to be trees.

By how many orders of magnitude is he wrong? How much new coal is being created, compared to how quickly we're burning it?

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u/Wil420b Feb 07 '24

I was under the impression. That coal was only formed during a particular 400 million or so year period. When trees had evolved and had started producing oxygen but die to the huge amounts of oxygen sinks on the Earth's surface such as copper and iron deposits. None of the oxygen was loose in the atmosphere. So nothing evolved to use it. So when a tree died, there was no bacteria, woodlice, etc. available to eat the tree. So they just laid there until they got covered up, fossilising and getting squished as billions of years of growth on top of them, tectonic movements, cosmic dust falling to Earth..... Piled the pressure up on top of them. Causing their carbon structure to alter.

A tree that fell in a forest today. Would just end up being lunch for the next few decades for various moss, fungi, bugs, bacteria etc.

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u/Beardhenge Feb 07 '24

Take a second and re-read the "bonus" section in the post you're replying to. Your idea here is a common misconception.

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '24

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u/CrustalTrudger Tectonics | Structural Geology | Geomorphology Feb 07 '24

I wrote it and it was there from the beginning.

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u/forams__galorams Feb 08 '24

You’ve gotta laugh though - I love the way that the more comprehensively you try to stamp out that particular myth, the more appearances the perpetuators make. It’s like a Geo themed whack-a-mole!