The Flood and the Formation of Coal Beds

This week a person at my church asked me how the fossil beds could have formed from the Flood. This person's question was prompted after he had spoke to a biologist who informed him that it would take millions of years to form the world's existing fossil beds.

In fact some geologists have claimed that even if all the vegetation on earth was suddenly converted to coal this would make a coal deposit only 1-3% of the known coal reserves on earth. That means it would take around 33 Noah’s Floods, staggered in time, to generate our known coal beds.

Consider this...

1) Biologists have overestimated how much vegetation is required to make coal. Originally it was believed to take to 12:1 ratio. It is believed by many to be much less. By some accounts it can be a 2:1 or less. Whatever the case may be it is probable that we can reduce the vegetation to coal transition ratio.

2) Also consider that 60% of today’s land surface is covered by deserts or only sparse vegetation. Only 40% of today's land contain fuller vegetation.

3) In the world before the Flood it would appear that all of the land was filled with abundant vegetation. For instance, beneath the vast icy wastes of Antarctica there are rock layers containing thick coal beds. So at one time Antarctica contained an environment of lush vegetation. Consider today's desserts where a great amount of our oil comes. (Keep in mind that the world under the influence of a global sub-tropical greenhouse effect before Noah’s Flood—implied by the Bible’s description of the ‘waters above’--the so-called water vapour canopy-- and the mist that watered the ground daily--instead of today’s unreliable intermittent rain--would have created a much better and more consistent environment for vegetation.

4) It is most likely that there was a much greater amount of land before the Flood than what exists today. Much of the water that now covers the globe was added at the Flood with the burst and down pour of the canopy and the release of water from below the earth's crust.
(10 And after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth. 11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. 12 And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights. Gen 7:10-12)

5) The fossil evidence indicates that ancient plant and animal life was much greater than it is now. (We had a family at the church who just got back from New Zealand and said that the plants are twice as large as the ones in the U.S. Imagine what they would have been like before the Flood.)

6) But there is another way of comparing vegetation growth and volume with the known coal beds, a way that is probably far more reliable, and that is by comparing the stored energy in vegetation with that in coal. International authority on solar energy, Mary Archer, has stated that the amount of solar energy falling on the earth’s surface in 14 days is equal to the known energy of the world’s supply of fossil fuels. She also said that only . 03 % of the solar energy arriving at the earth’s surface is stored as chemical energy in vegetation through photosynthetic processes. From this information we can estimate how many years of today’s plant growth would be required to produce the stored energy equivalent in today’s known coal reserves:

Divide 14 days by .03%i.e. (14 x 100)/.03 days equals 46,667 days or 128 years of solar input via photosynthesis. So we can conclude that only 128 years of plant growth at today’s rate and volume is all that is required to provide the energy equivalent stored in today’s known coal beds! There was, of course, ample time between Creation and Noah’s Flood for such plant growth to occur—1600 years, in fact.

Summary...

1) With less vegetation to coal transition ratio than often suggested...

2) With a more plentiful vegetation to land mass ratio than currently exists...

3) With a much greater land mass than exists today...

4) With much greater vegetation than exists today...

5) With a more realistic assessment of the time needed to store energy into coal...

You have a plausible framework of how the Flood produced existing coal beds.