3 ms·
The dead forests you mentioned may have became massive coal beds via the "charcoal route"; i.e. a global firestorm may have incinerated essentially the entire b
by apw 13y ago
The dead forests you mentioned may have became massive coal beds via the "charcoal route"; i.e. a global firestorm may have incinerated essentially the entire biosphere.
The global debris layer created by the end-Cretaceous
impact at Chicxulub contained enough soot to indicate
that the entire terrestrial biosphere had burned.
Source:
K-Pg extinction: Reevaluation of the heat-fire hypothesis;
Robertson, Lewis, Sheehan & Toon, 2013;
Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jgrg.20018/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jgrg.20018/abstra...
- fhars 13y agoNo, the coal beds are far older and far thicker than the bit of end-cretaceaous soot that paper is talking about. The K-Pg boundary sediments are thin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cretaceous_Paleogene_clay_at_Geulhemmergroeve.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cretaceous_Paleogene_clay_... Your typical coal bed is quite a bit thicker: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Coal_mine_Wyoming.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Coal_mine_Wyoming.jpg