- Key People:
- Joseph Barrell
- Johann Gottlob Lehmann
- Related Topics:
- sedimentation
- clay
- gravel
- sand
- cementation
Coals are the most abundant organic-rich sedimentary rock. They consist of undecayed organic matter that either accumulated in place or was transported from elsewhere to the depositional site. The most important organic component in coal is humus. The grade or rank of coal is determined by the percentage of carbon present. The term peat is used for the uncompacted plant matter that accumulates in bogs and brackish swamps. With increasing compaction and carbon content, peat can be transformed into the various kinds of coal: initially brown coal or lignite, then soft or bituminous coal, and finally, with metamorphism, hard or anthracite coal. In the geologic record, coal occurs in beds, called seams, which are blanketlike coal deposits a few centimetres to metres or hundreds of metres thick.
Many coal seams occur within cyclothems, rhythmic successions of sandstone, mudrock, and limestone in which nonmarine units are regularly and systematically overlain by an underclay, the coal seam itself, and then various marine lithologies. The nonmarine units are thought to constitute the floor of ancient forests and swamps developed in low-lying coastal regions; the underclay is a preserved relict of the soil in which the coal-producing vegetation was rooted; and the marine units overlying the coal record the rapid transgression of the sea inland that killed the vegetation by drowning it and preventing its decomposition by rapid burial. The exact mechanism responsible for generating the rapid episodes of marine transgression and regression necessary to generate coal-bearing cyclothems is not definitively known. A combination of episodic upwarping and downwarping of the continental blocks or global (eustatic) changes in sea level or both, coupled with normal changes in the rate of sediment supply that occurs along coasts traversed by major laterally meandering river systems, may have been the cause.
In any case, coal is a rare, though widely distributed, lithology. Extensive coal deposits overall occur mainly in rocks of Devonian age (those from 408 to 360 million years old) and younger because their existence is clearly contingent on the evolution of land plants. Nevertheless, small, scattered coal deposits as old as early Proterozoic have been described. Coal-bearing cyclothem deposits are especially abundant in the middle and late Paleozoic sequences of the Appalachians and central United States and in the Carboniferous of Great Britain, probably because during this time interval global climates were warm and humid and large portions of the continental blocks were low-lying platforms located only slightly above sea level.