C'est un genre d'argument " d'homme de paille " qui a été employé pour critiquer le concept d'une histoire courte pendant la vie sur terre. Je doute de que n'importe qui affirmerait que le matériel préservé comme charbon était le résultat d'un an de croissance, particulièrement si la terre était couverte d'eau et de ciel occlu avec des nuages. Cependant c'est une question intéressante, et soulève les questions intéressantes que nous pouvons discuter.

This is a kind of "straw man" argument that has been used to discredit the concept of a short history for life on earth. I doubt that anyone would assert that the material preserved as coal was the result of one year of growth, especially if the earth was covered with water and the sky occluded with clouds. However it is an interesting question, and raises interesting questions that we can discuss.

The tables below list the proved and estimated world coal, oil and gas reserves.

5,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas would convert to about 94 billion short tons of carbon (coal). 1040 bbl oil would be equivalent to 180 billion tons of carbon (coal)

Adding these to the 10100 billion tons of coal, gives a world total of 10374 billion tons of fossil carbon from plant materials (gas, oil, and coal).

Compared with this, the present biosphere represents only about 829 billion tons of carbon, about 8% of the carbon mass preserved as coal, oil and gas. About 243 billion metric tons of dry plant biomass are produced per year. If the earth were operating under conditions that were optimal, we could perhaps increase this value by a factor of 10 (larger land mass, higher CO₂, concentration, no deserts, vegetation overgrowing the oceans, optimum biomass in the ocean and seas...see below).

Allowing this optimization, we could conceivably accumulate 2,000 billion tons dry weight of vegetation per year. If an average accumulation of organic material represented ten years of growth, 20,000 billion tons of organic material would have been present on the surface of the earth at the time of the flood. In addition, about 2000 years of carbon accumulation with perhaps 10 - 20% of the carbon being permanently preserved as dispersed carbon in the sediments and the water column may have been present. Finally, there would have been an unknown amount of organic carbon added to the earth at creation to prepare the surface for habitation. Thus much of the carbon from the preflood biosphere must have ended up in places other than coal or oil and gas.

Extant peat bogs also afford an example of how the preflood environment could have held a much higher carbon reservoir than just what is in the present biomass. Other reservoirs may have included floating masses of vegetation such as are found in modern quaking bogs. Much of the Paleozoic plant vegetation must have grown under these conditions, not just because the modern representatives of these groups do, but because a even a cursory analysis of the rooting structures associated with these plants indicates they could not have grown in soil. The roots of many of the dominant tree ferns (Psaronius) show aerenchymatous (very large, thin-walled cells) tissue, characteristic of aquatic or semiaquatic plants.The common stigmaria root grew from a blunt terminal bud, throwing out pencil sized blunt rootlets with very thin walled cells, ideal for obtaining support from a bog substrate, but completely incapable of penetrating soil. Thus these forms could easily have grown atop ponderous masses of floating vegetation, allowing the possibility of an additional very large carbon reservoir.

While tropical regions store carbon in vegetation, soil is now understood to play a larger storage role in temperate regions. Total carbon stored in Canadian soils is estimated to be 263 billion tons, even under modern conditions, which are far from ideal in this environment. In British soils, for example, the carbon reservoir is estimated at 22 billion tons. But 75% of this 22 billion tons of organic carbon in the soils of Great Britain is locked up in Scotland's peat bogs! (see "Peat bogs hold bulk of Britain's carbon", New Scientist, p.6, 19 November 1994).

There was, at least in theory, more than enough carbon on the preflood earth to account for all of the coal, oil, gas and dispersed carbon of organic origin in the sediments.

______________________________________________________ Ó 2010 Arthur V. Chadwick, Ph.D.