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Of Coal and Oil

One such evidence has to do with the coal and oil found buried in the earth. The formation of coal requires large quantities of vegetation. If about 20 feet of vegetation is compressed adiabatically, that is, compressed without the loss of the heat of compression, the result is about one foot of coal. So tremendous amounts of vegetation were necessary to form our great coal deposits. Petroleum is believed to have been produced in similar fashion, except that the starting material was animal material rather than vegetable. Compressed adiabatically, animal material will form petroleum.

There may be some truth to that old slogan about putting a tiger in your tank.

Since it is believed that coal was produced from vegetation and oil from animal life, it is instructive to compare the estimated amounts of these two fossil fuels. The total carbon content of all of the coal deposits in the world is estimated to be about one hundred times that of the petroleum deposits. This is interesting, for the estimated masses of the present vegetation and animal life on the earth are in the approximate ratio of one hundred-to-one. This suggests that the coal and petroleum were formed by a cataclysmic destruction of the entire biosphere, which was buried under heavy overburdens of sediment and largely converted to these two fossil fuels.

This conclusion is in agreement with what the Bible reports.