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Show Coal Was Created Before Human Advent What is coal? How was it made? Well, it all started many millions of years ago, in what is caUed the Carboniferous Period. We sometimes some-times call it the Coal Age. The climate was very warm and moist all over the earth. There were heavy rains. Plants grew fast and luxuriantly, especially in swampy areas. In our country, these great swamps extended in all directions to where we find coal today in what is now Pennsylvania and the whole Appalachian range, the middle Atlantic states, the Rocky Mountains, and even the far away Pacific Coast. The forest trees resembled giant ferns, reeds, and mosses, rising to heights of 100 to 120 feet, and many feet in diameter. diame-ter. Other trees looked much like enormous ferns, climbing 50 feet into the air. Everything was green and lush in this strange world. The giant trees, ferns, grasses, insect life and other creatures, died, fell into the swamps and became part of the sea life buried there. Heavy rains washed soil and sand from high places into the swampy lowlands. low-lands. Land gradually sank. The great inland seas advanced and covered up these peat-like bogs, keeping out air and bacteria that cause decay. Again conditions on the earth changed. The land was raised up and once more forests grew, flourished, and died. Again the land sank and the seas advanced. ad-vanced. This process continued over and over through untold thousands of years. The sunshine, whose warmth and magic made these forests, was buried with the vegetation. vege-tation. Slowly the forests piled up one atop of the other, the peat layers began changing into something some-thing we now call lignite, and the enormous deposits of dead leaves, branches, trunks, insect life, and sea life were transformed slowly into coal and other minerals. |