Coal; Jetty rock w oil
Coal
Chunks
of coal,
as well as slag from burned coal and smelted
iron, are found in the bay and ocean wrack lines at Sandy Hook.
Coal
had been an important source of heat in public buildings and power
plants until
the late 1960’s. Most of the coal washing up on the beach came
from spillage from ships, or from dumped “cellar ash”. Some of it
may be from “sea
coal” carried along the coast from rivers in the Appalachian
coal fields and
from the Valley and Ridge province long before it was mined. It
was abundant enough on Long Island beaches that a permit
was issued in 1677 to locate significant deposits.
With
more pressure, heat and time, peat transforms into lignite,
bituminous, and eventually, anthracite coal. Most coal was formed in
peat or coal swamp forests (scroll down to The
Coal Age) about 300 million years ago during the Carboniferous
Period:
“Coal
forms from the accumulation of plant debris, usually in a swamp
environment. When a plant dies and falls into the swamp, the standing
water of the swamp protects it from decay. Swamp waters are usually
deficient in oxygen, which would react with the plant debris and
cause it to decay. This lack of oxygen allows the plant debris to
persist.” When this layer of peat is buried by sediments, the
weight “compacts the plant debris and aids in its transformation
into coal. About ten feet of plant debris will compact into just one
foot of coal.”
Some
chunks
may also be lignite deposits from the Raritan-Magothy
Formation where it outcrops along Raritan Bay in Middlesex
County. Recently formed peat from tidal flats and salt marshes can
also be seen in the wrack line after storms, and cedar
peat deposits have been found in cores of the seafloor a few
hundred feet off coastal lakes in Monmouth County. Here
are more pictures of peat, lignite and coal; scroll down for a
picture of
peat with clam borings found on a beach in Long Island.
Tarballs
While
most coal was formed from peat swamps about 300 million years ago,
oil and natural gas were formed from plankton, most of it from 252
to 66 million years ago.
Black
round tarballs
from oil spills from refineries
along Raritan Bay and oil
tankers can periodically be found in the wrack line at Sandy
Hook. About 21 billion gallons oil transported by marine tankers
passed under the Verrazano Bridge in 2010, as reported in “A
Stronger, More Resilient New York” (p134, pdf-p 4).
Scientists
from the University of Utah have calculated that it takes 98 tons of
these buried prehistoric plants to produce a single gallon of
gasoline. They also found that the amount of fossil fuel burned in
one year is equivalent to "'all
the plant matter that grows in the world in a year,'"
including vast amounts of microscopic plant life in the oceans.”
Volcanoes
were a major source of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during
the period of geologic time known as “Greenhouse
Earth”. A superplume
caused by abundant
volcanoes produced 4000
ppm of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that melted the
icecaps during the Cretaceous and put the NJ coastline between
the Watchung Mountains and Rt 1 (scroll to Figure “Generalized
geographic map
of the United
States in Late Cretaceous time”).
Currently,
carbon dioxide produced by fossil fuels is about 130
times present volcanic emissions, but just one
tenth of the catastrophic super-plume levels of the Cretaceous.
Widespread
scientific consensus exists among scientists that are experts in the
field of climate studies that the world’s climate is now changing
(NASA)
faster (NOAA)
due to burning so much of these plant-derived fossil fuels.
The
other four blogs are at http://pehealthnj.blogspot.com/
.
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