How was coal formed? Detailed answer

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How was coal formed? Detailed answer

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How was coal formed?

Coal was formed in different periods of the Earth's development. The longest period in which coal was formed is the Pennsylvania Period, which began about 250 years ago and lasted about 000 years. The rest of the coal formed between one and one hundred million years ago.

What happened at that time and how was coal formed? Coal is located in the earth's crust in the form of layers up to several kilometers long and up to three meters thick between rocks. Coal is the remains of ancient trees and plants that grew in swampy jungles in a warm, humid climate hundreds of millions of years ago.

Such swamps were dominated by fast-growing reeds and gigantic ferns. Over time, they died off and fell into the swamp. This saved them from decay. Bacteria processed some parts of the trees, turning them into a gas that escaped. What remained was a black mass, consisting mainly of carbon. In the future, it turned into a layer of coal.

The lush vegetation gradually increased this layer to a thickness of several meters. In the end, this process stopped when the area was covered with water. As a result, coal seams were covered with layers of bottom sediments and sand.

Over time, the pressure of the upper layers displaced the liquid, leaving a paste-like mass, which, slowly solidifying, turned into coal. In some places this process was repeated several times. The resulting layer of sediments was covered with water, and a swamp re-formed in this place. Again a layer of vegetation appeared, and again it was flooded. In this way, layers of coal were created, separated by silt and sand, which hardened over time.

It takes many thousands of years to turn wood into coal. It is easy to see evidence that charcoal originated from wood. Occasionally, well-preserved imprints of fern, tree bark, as well as fossilized pieces of trunks and stumps are found in coal.

Author: Likum A.

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

What is leprosy?

Since ancient times, the disease we call leprosy has terrorized people. A person suffering from leprosy suffered physically and mentally, as he was forced to live in isolation from other people. No one wanted to be near him throughout his life. At present, we know much more about leprosy and have the opportunity to treat it in various ways.

Leprosy is an infectious disease that is transmitted directly or through third parties. It acts on the skin or the nerves or both. The bacterium causing the infection was identified in Norway by Dr. Hansen. Therefore, leprosy is also known as Hansen's disease. Despite the fact that the disease has been known for hundreds of years, leprosy microbes are not common.

How the infection appears, we do not know. But microbes mostly penetrate the skin first and infect it. If the body has high resistance, then nodules and tumors form slowly. Nodules very often appear on the skin in the forehead, nose, eyes and lips. It disfigures the appearance of a person.

When the infection affects the nerves, the person stops feeling anything. Therefore, a leper can very easily injure himself, may not feel a burn or a cut. The muscles become useless, causing the arms and legs to look like paws or claws. It happens that the bones of the arms and legs rot.

Leprosy has settled throughout the world, but is most prevalent in the tropics, North Africa, China and India. Oddly enough, leprosy can appear in the US, especially in the south of the country.

Doctors now believe that leprosy is not as contagious as it used to be. Many people are treated for this disease at home instead of being isolated. Some antibiotics can prevent the progression of the disease. There are people who recover completely after undergoing treatment.

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Jellyfish restore the body 04.07.2015

All living beings have the ability to regenerate, it’s just that for some it is expressed to a lesser extent (for example, we cannot grow a finger or a leg to replace the lost ones), for someone it is more (for newts, for example, to restore a leg , eye or some internal organ is not a problem at all). Champions of self-healing can be called coelenterates - hydras, jellyfish and their relatives, although here it should still be remembered that they are much simpler than the same newts. In studies of regeneration, one of the most frequent model objects is the freshwater hydra from a biology textbook, which, after any injury, after any damage, can do everything as it was.

But, as it turned out, coelenterates do not always "do everything as it was." Michael Abrams (Michael Abrams) and his colleagues from the California Institute of Technology experimented with larvae-ethers of the jellyfish Aurelia eared. Ethers are simpler than adult jellyfish: a small disc-shaped body with 8 double outgrowth lobes at the edges, no tentacles as such, the digestive system is underdeveloped. One or more "arms" - blades were cut off from the larva, after which it healed the wound rather quickly, in a few hours. However, a new blade did not appear to replace the lost one. Instead, the ether rebuilt the body so as to become symmetrical again - regardless of how many "arms" were left for her, seven, five, or just two.

As you know, jellyfish are radially symmetrical animals: they can distinguish the upper part of the body from the lower, but it is impossible to separate the left side from the right. When moving, the jellyfish “slams” its dome and oral lobes (and the larva with the lobes located along the edges of the body), and it is the symmetry in its own structure that allows animals to move in the right direction. If any of the "limbs" is missing, then due to the resulting empty space, hydrodynamics will be disturbed, the water flows will go the wrong way when pushed, and the jellyfish will not be able to control its movements. Therefore, it turns out to be more important for the larva not so much to re-grow the lost lobe as to restore the symmetrical structure of the body. Moreover, asymmetric ether quite often, in 15% of cases, could not turn into an adult jellyfish at all.

In an article in PNAS, the authors write that the body of the larvae was rebuilt by muscular efforts: if a substance that relaxes muscle cells was added to the water where they lived, then symmetrization occurred much more slowly. On the contrary, if the ether muscles under the influence of an increased concentration of magnesium salts began to contract faster, then the symmetrical structure was restored more quickly.

Obviously, the whole point here is that due to the loss of the blades, the mechanical forces in the body of the jellyfish turned out to be unbalanced, which naturally led to a restructuring of the elastic body. At the same time, ethers did without stimulating active cell division and death, as it happens in regenerative processes in other animals - obviously, an acceptable result can be achieved mechanically here without high energy costs for cellular dynamics. Larvae of other species of jellyfish also turned out to be capable of symmetrization - of course, it would be interesting to find out whether adult jellyfish and other radially symmetrical organisms are capable of such a trick.

The results obtained once again tell us that morphogenesis is the formation of body parts, organs, etc. - depends not only on molecular genetic processes, but also on purely physical interactions between different parts of the body. It is known that human cells also sensitively react to mechanical forces, which can sometimes have a decisive influence on their cellular fate; it is possible that in the medical regeneration of our tissues and organs, more success can be achieved if we pay attention to their "physics".

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