OT: can someone check my figures?

[Richard]

WTF? I thought it was just a scare tactic that it made you blind. You shoulda listened!

[Chris Hogg]

Sorry to hear of your afflictions. We all have them in one form or another. It's what happens when you get old.

But you do anyway!

[Andrew]

100 Billion years ago, there was about 31% oxygen in the atmosphere, which allowed creatures to get so massive.

So a third of the planets oxygen has 'gone', but gone where ?. Can't all have been turned into CO2 and SO2.

Was it stripped off during those occasional inversions of the magnetic poles allowed cosmic winds to do their damage ?.

[Tim Streater]

100 billyun years ago was 85 billyun years before the Big Bang.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Rust, mainly

[Roger Hayter]

A pretty small fraction of land area, and not very productive in terms of ernergy per area. Does it ever get to coal though - if so very slowly.

Most of the orgainic content is turned over rather than accumulating.

[The Natural Philosopher]

You dont watch 'time team' then?

Why do you think the older stuff is always deeper down?

Rate of deposition of topsoil is about 2" a century ...

[Roger Hayter]

I meant chemically turned-over. What is the organic content of the lower layers of topsoil? Not very great I would think. Though of course I could be wrong. I would have thought you needed pretty much pure organic material to make coal or oil.

[The Natural Philosopher]

well peat is pretty much 100% organic, and in my old back garden the top couple of inches were black leafmould - nothing grew under the hawthorns there, as it was too dark.

plants do not recycle CO2, they fix it, and if they die and compost that simply makes more soil.

To an extend roots piercing the topsoil in search of water do in fact break up and mix the subsoil minerals with the topsoil, but its only an extent.

In the end whats left over of te plant is solid carbon. Some of dead plant matter is processed by aerobic bacteria to CO2, but once te organic materail is covered over, its anearobic breakdown and no CO2 is released.

Agriculuture of couyrse by ploughing exposes the organics to the air: the fens shrink quite fast simply due to oxidation as well as drying out.

>

[David]

Go to Ireland and visit the many, many peat bogs.

There you can see the locals cutting the peat, drying it, stacking it, then taking it home to burn.

If nobody were to harvest it, eventually (a very, very long time) some would get buried deeper, turn to Lignite (brown coal) and then to various types of black coal.

As far as I can see most of the work of creating an organic fuel has already taken place and is in constant use.

A bit like fine wine, it needs laying down in a dark place for a bit to improve.

Cheers

Dave R