Location Taken: Ohio, maybe?
Time Taken: May 2007
Apparently I need more dinosaurs in my blog so here’s some more-
No wait, that’s a bunch of trucks.
Eh, close enough, right?
Big lumbering things (that still move pretty quickly), rampaging across the countryside.
And, to use the classic jokes, fossil fuels are made of dinosaurs so there are dinos in this photo (or at least things containing dinos).
…That’s not true, mind you. Oil is almost entirely made out of extremely decomposed sea algae. And coal is made mostly out of swamp plants. The really good coal deposits were laid down during the Carboniferous era, when the world happened to have vast wetlands in tropical regions for optimal swamp-plant production. And by vast I mean continent-sized shallow seas surrounded by and containing swamps. And the Carboniferous ended a good 67 million years before dinosaurs started showing up. Which, coincidentally, is pretty close to the same amount of time that’s passed since the dinosaurs died off, some 66 million years ago.
Ah, the joys of geologic time, when an extra million years is “close”.
It does take all those millions of years for oil and coal to form. Organic matter gets trapped underground, and then the heat and pressure get to work, slowly cooking and pressing away all the complexity until you’re left with a lovely mess of carbon that burns really well. Or oozes out of the ground in a sticky mess, if it’s oil.
And then we take it, apply chemistry to it, and burn away millions of years of work in a matter of days just to get ourselves somewhere else in a hurry.
