> Wayne writes:
>
> A catastrophic flood would have removed fragile rootlets.
>
> Wayne, Are you pretty sure about that? we have lots of evidence to the
> point after Mt. St. Helens. Plenty of small rootlets preserved on trees
> transported and deposited upright there. See the paper by Fritz in Geology,
> v. 8, p. 586-588 for example.
> Art
> http://chadwicka.swau.edu
>
Hi Art maybe I should direct this to Brian but you seem to be the expert
and would appreciate your take on the following.
There are many evidences that coal seams were formed rapidly, probably by
transportation of massed plant accumulations by flooding waters,
interspersed by alternative flows of sand or silt or lime mud from other directions.
a. Fossil trees are sometimes found standing on an angle and even upside
down in the coal seams.
b. Coal seams occasionally split into two seams separated by transported
marine sediments.
c. Marine fossils - tubeworms, sponges, corals, mollusks, etc., - are
often found in coal beds.
d. Many coal seams have no sign of a fossil soil under them. The
"underclays" sometimes cited are not true soils, with a soil profile, and most
authorities now believe they are transported materials.
e. Large boulders are often found in coal beds.
f. The so-called stigmaria, sometimes cited as roots of the coal-seam
trees, have been shown by Rupke to be fragments unattached to specific trees
and actually transported into place by water currents.
F.M. Broadhurst, "Some Aspects of the paleoecology of Non-Marine Faunas
and Rates of Sedimentation in the Lancashire Coal Measures," American Journal of
Science
"In the case of the Permo-Carboniferous of India, the Barakar Series of
the Damuda Series, overlying the Talchir Boulder Bed, includes numerous coal
seams, some up to 100 feet thick, occurring in a well-developed and
oft-repeated cycle of sandstone, shale, coal...The vegetation is
considered to be drift accumulation."
The concept of periodic epirogeny is a reasonable one, but a more or less
complete cessation of clastic sedimentation in the lacustrine basin during coal
accumulation is difficult to account for on a wholly diastrophic origin. As an
explanation for the fifty to sixty cycles of the Damuda system, it has an
element of unreality."
S.E. Hollingsworth, "The Climatic Factor in the Geological Record."
Quarterly Journal, Geological Society of London.
-Randy