Serowbot wrote on 10/16/23 at 13:09:55:(Quoting JoG) But IF in that 18 year period the world sucked two cubic miles of oil out, then the cube is two miles on each side.
A cube with a volume of 2 cubic miles features a side measurement of ~1.26 miles. Were I to be subject of the hypothetical ride, the first moment would likely be spent dumbfounded by the spectacle, followed by suffocation from off gassing volatile organic compounds, as my bike failed to crank from a lack of O2- and all in under 2 minutes.
Serowbot wrote on 10/16/23 at 13:09:55:(Quoting JoG) Nobody wants to describe the mechanism by which enough mass and of Things to Decay and become oil got captured and under the ground, below layers of rock, into places where the formation pressure will Blow Water out of the well. But I'm supposed to believe enough flora and fauna got buried and turned into all that oil? If the world was that unstable then why are there any dinosaur fossils to find?
Not only are there people that want to explain this, people have done so at length.
While 'common sense reckoning' and the anecdotal and analogous examples may be problematic, I'll take a swing at it, starting with a pie crust as example:
To make a delicious, flaky crust, the dough must not be over mixed, discrete platelets of butter being allowed to remain and impart a delightful consistency; observers of the mixing process and product will likely recognize no action taken to preserve these elements, nor be able to easily discern them in the dough.
A literal
Earth's crust analogy.
Fossils, as with every other darn thing that makes up the Earth's crust, mantle, and all the other layers, are not uniformly subject to homogenization. Despite the action of millions of years, tectonic drift and plates rising and subsuming, there still remains geologic record (you know, stuff- lots and lots of stuff) indicating continents were once in contact.
As it would happen, there is a compelling and ACTIONABLELY conclusive fossil and geological record that affirms that organic hydrocarbons are the product of observed processes and not inexplicable. I point your attention to most any neighborhood established in the year you were born. Observe the mighty trees, their branches spread wide, providing shade. Where did the tree come from? Not from the soil- were that the case, the tree would be deep within a tree-sized hole, soil consumed to produce tree-stuff. (Ahh!- the SOIL -don't forget the soil... we'll come back to it!) So where does the bulk of a tree come from? From carbon in the atmosphere, respirated and metabolized into tree-stuff. Look to the edge of the side walk, at the lawn. What do we see? The soil on which that grass depends may well be several inches taller than where it was those many decades ago. How is that? Like the tree, the grass has sequestered carbon drawn from the atmosphere. But grass, like trees, is not forever: the decayed elements of tree and grass and every other organic thing heaped upon the Earth eventually contributes to the soil. How much soil? ALL of the organic loams and clays and peat and stuff that forms the blanket of humus- however deep -that covers the Earth. All of it used to be trees and plants and presumptive bloggers- and THAT amounts to much, much more than the paltry few square miles of fossil hydrocarbons that confront the imagination of the OP.
Today, our best understanding of the origin of fossil fuels does not significantly include large animals, but reaches back long before T-Rex was unable to tie their shoes- all the way back to the origin of those soil-building trees. For millions of years after the first trees reached skyward to compete for sunlight, they did so uninhibited by microorganisms capable of digesting the novel lignin and cellulose they produced, with resulting accumulation of vast amounts of organic detritus. When fungus and other agents of decay eventually adapted to eat what trees made is when the massive explosion of terrestrial life was unleashed- and the geologically significant to our narrative mass of organic decay entered the fossil record.
Even with the blink-of-an-eye life span that we enjoy, the accumulation of soil and organic material is easily directly observed. In my neighborhood, built in the earl 80's, that amounts to 4", or more. A mere 40 years, not tens of millions, or the 420 million years since the dawn of the trees, or 180 million years since tectonic drift carried the continents apart.
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On my way out the door, I received a message from
thumperclone, saying how he would miss my contribution. This one's for you, dude.
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