Coal Made Really Simple

I pointed out in my posting "Oil Made Really Simple" on this blog that there is a definite pattern to where oil is found under the ground on earth. There is also a pattern to where coal is to be found that I cannot see has been documented anywhere. There is no pattern to where metals are located simply because those were deposited by random meteorites.

Coal is the result of the decomposition, burial and, chemical conversion of plants. Coal only forms in the tropics with the luxuriant plant growth to be found there but since the continents have drifted mostly northward by the system of plate tectonics, all of the northern continents of today were once in the tropics. It is not possible for coal to form in the present day climates of Britain or the Appalachian region of the U.S. Coal has even been found in Antarctica.

The harder coals that are highest in carbon content, such as anthracite and bituminous, are the oldest ones. Lignite, or soft brown coal, is not as old. Anthracite is composed of 80-95% carbon, lignite only about 40%. Peat is the first stage in coal formation and if the coal undergoes extreme pressure for a long period of time, graphite can result. It is the degree of pressure on the coal during burial that determines it's hardness.

My hypothesis is that coal is most likely to be found under the ground on lowland that is adjacent to highland. This is where the greatest plant growth was likely to occur when the land was in the tropics, since water from storms would drain into the lowlands. This will obviously not apply to highland-lowland systems that were not in existence when the land was in the tropical regions.

There are examples of this to be seen across the world. The mountains of south Wales are known to be extremely ancient and have been worn down by erosion over the eons. They must have been high enough once to block weather and so would have taken in a great amount of rain that would have drained to the south and produced lush tropical plant growth. The vast amount of coal that is to be found in the valleys and lowland of south Wales today is the result.

The same process formed the coal in Scotland's lowland "waist" just north of Edinburgh and Glasgow. It is a broad valley with highland and mountains on both sides. There are mountains across the southern part of Ireland but the mountains are more spread out and were not as high or extensive and so only a moderate amount of coal is to be found there.

There is a line from east to west across the southern part of Belgium, south of Brussels, where the continental highland meets the lowland nearer the sea. As you might expect, much coal is to be found on the lowland side of the line. This extends to the vast coal deposits around the French city of Lille and the Ruhr Valley of Germany. It is here, along with Britain, that the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution was powered by this coal. There are smaller coalfields around the Massif Central, the broad plateau in southeastern France.

The extensive deposits of lignite in the eastern part of Germany are on lowland just off the Sudeten Mountains. In Poland and the Slovak Republic, there is a large field of coal north and west of the Carpathian Mountains. This pattern of coal found on lowland adjacent to highland seems to apply everywhere.

In the eastern U.S., the name "Appalaichan" is practically synonomous with coal. This is a long mountain chain with much coal to be found in it's valleys and sorrounding lowlands. The Appalaichans are very old mountains, long worn down by erosion, that have been around long enough for all of this coal to form.

More coal formed in the lowland south of Chicago that lies between two areas of higher ground that would channel in water from tropical storms to grow the plants that would produce the coal. There is another vast stretch of coal from Iowa south to Oklahoma that lies just east of higher ground, which would make it the recipient of a lot of water when the continent was southward in the tropics.

In Australia coal is, as we might expect, found in lowlands alongside the Great Dividing Range. There is large coal deposits in the areas of both Sydney and Brisbane. The low ground in central Nigeria, with highland on either side, has quite a bit of coal. The lowland in the eastern part of China is rich in coal, fed by long-ago water from higher ground to the west. There is no finer example of coal forming on lowland adjacent to highland than China's Szechwan Basin.

The Central Siberian Plateau and mountains to the east of it funneled water to produce a lot of coal on nearby lowlands when it was once in the tropics. The mountainous Korean Peninsula has a lot of coal in both North and South Korea in it's lower areas. India has an extensive coalfield around the eastern part of the Vindhya Mountain Range and also in lowlands from Nagpur southwestward.