Kathy Jackson, age 9, of Dallas, Tex
How does nature make coal?
A lovely lady, you may be sure, is always busy. She primps herself, she cooks, keeps house and tends her children. And our old Mother Nature is the loveliest of all ladies. She is always primping to keep herself beautiful and she certainly tends to her children and keeps her huge house in order. And once in a while she bakes a rocky batter, or so it seems.
We might say that Mother Nature baked and shaped the layers of glossy black coal in the crust of the earth. The ingredients she used came from the plant world, just as the flour your mother uses to make a batch of cookies came from the plant world. Natures coal‑making plants, however, grew in the world millions of years ago and it took ages and ages of time to make them into batches of coal.
Most of our coal was made from forests that flourished more than 200 million years ago. This was before the bunnies, the cats, the dogs and even the birds came to live in the world. The little lizards had not yet grown into big dinosaurs. And the trees in those ancient forests were not at all like the lovely trees in our parks and forests.
The coal‑making trees were giant ferns and plants that looked like our straggly horsetails and were tall as elms. Many of these weird forests grew in swampy ground where there were mosses and slimy water weeds. A forest, of course, is .forever losing old trees and growing new ones. The old trees decay because tiny bacteria break them down into simple chemicals,, These chemicals seep into the soil to feed the growing new trees.
If the special decay bacteria are not around, the old trees and fallen leaves cannot rot and become plant food. And there were no decay bacteria in the still waters of the ancient coal forests. 01d trunks and boughs, leaves and branches fell into the water and just stayed there.
In time, the swamps dried up. Dirt and muddy silt piled on top of what was left of the ancient forests.
Through the ages, the remains of the old forest became buried under heavy layers of new rock. They were crushed and pressed and slowly baked in underground heat. The baking changed the ingredients from the old forest, just as baking in the oven changes a tacky batter into crisp, dry cookies. Some of the chemicals in the old plants were forced to leave and the mixture was squeezed hard and solid. After millions of years, only the carbon and a few other chemicals were left and the ancient forest of plants had become glossy black coal.
Most of our buried coal was made from forests that flourished around 200 million years ago. But Mother Nature did not forget her coal‑making recipe. She made more coal from swampland plants that came along later. In fact, certain of our mossy swamplands will someday be coal, though it still takes Mother Nature millions of years to finish the recipe.