Script for the first part of my carboniferous video? (Patreon)

  This is a video I had/have planned for my geology series. I want to do a good job on this so I am actually writing a script for once. below you will find my first draft. I have also been collecting extant species of plants that existed during the period: fern, equestrium, liverwort, moss, ect. as well as a chunk of anthracite coal dating to the pennsylvanian. let me know what you think!

Alright everyone welcome back to cody’s lab.

Today I am going to tell you all about my favorite geological time period; the carboniferous. a period lasting from 360 million years ago – 300 million years ago. Vascular plants just evolved and started taking over the land, prior to this the only plants were mosses, liverwort, and algae. Nothing more than a few inches tall. But with the advent of structural cellulose and a vascular system plants could grow to incredible heights. For the first time forests containing huge amounts of biomass were possible. Whats more that biomass was for the most part completely inert since nothing had evolved that could digest cellulose. So when a 200ft tree fell over and died it more or less just stuck around getting buried by more fallen plant matter. This process removed massive amounts of carbon from the atmosphere to the point that a global ice age could have occurred due to lack of heat trapping CO2. Coincidentally however this period also played host to extensive volcanism that released massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, replacing what the plants consumed. In fact without the plants sequestering the excess carbon this could have gone the other way and the earth could have become incredibly hot, possibly similar to Venus. 

The carbon dioxide didn’t go away completely though, in fact the “dioxide” part of “carbon dioxide” was given off by the plants as molecular oxygen. This increased the oxygen levels in the air quite significantly. The oxygen concentration eventually reached between 35 and 40% which is almost double today’s values. Nitrogen, the most prevalent molecule in the atmosphere, however has remained pretty much the same since day one due to its inert-ness. This coupled with oxygen’s greater density, means that the extra oxygen resulted in significantly increased atmospheric pressure. This all boils down to the air containing much more oxygen per unit volume than it does today. 

If you breathe through your skin, as almost all animals of the time did, your body size is limited by how much oxygen you can absorb. And so the increased levels of oxygen means that it became much easier for such animals to breath, therefore a larger body size became possible. Imagine dragon flies with 6-foot wing spans buzzing around and millipedes the size of a bus burrowing through the leaf litter dropped by 200ft tall trees and you will have an idea of what the carboniferous was like; It truly was the age of bugs. 

Now with all this carbon and oxygen laying around you might imagine that this was also the age of fire and you wouldn’t be wrong. Coal seams from the period (which unsurprisingly is roughly 90% of the world’s coal) contain up to 30% charcoal indicating that forest fires were indeed a common occurrence. Geologists estimate that a large fire ravaged the carboniferous forests about once a century. I would pay good money to go back in time and watch such a fire progress. How much faster would it burn? Would relatively green/wet plants burn as if they were dry? How loud would the pops from the exploding giant roasted bugs be? I can make some guesses but I don’t really know so how about we do some tests in my press-vack chamber to find out!