>I was waiting for Glenn to get into this. In his book he has a
>calculation using all the oil deposits, all the fossils, and all the
>minerals that used to be living organisms. The amount is truly
>staggering. The world would have been covered with forests (even the cold
>parts) and the oceans would have been pea soup with plankton (supposing
>they could have survived that dense, which is extremely doubtful). The
>forests would have been chock full of animals and even then you'd be
>short. I don't have the book with me right now, but it was pretty
>interesting.
Extant peat bogs give an example of how the modern environment could hold a
much higher carbon reservoir than just what is in the present biomass.
Other examples may have included floating masses of vegetation such as in
modern quaking bogs. Much of the Paleozoic plant vegetation must have grown
under these conditions, not just because the modern representatives of these
groups do, but because a even a cursory analysis of the rooting structures
associated with these plants indicates they could not have grown in soil.
Many of the tree ferns had arenchymous roots, the common stigmaria root grew
from a blunt terminal bud, throwing out pencil sized rootlets with very thin
walled cells, ideal for obtaining support from a bog substrate, but
completely incapable of penetrating soil. Thus these forms could easily
have grown atop ponderous masses of floating vegetation, allowing the
possibility of a very large carbon reservoir.
Art
http://chadwicka.swau.edu