Science

Fossil Fuel Formation Was Vital For Evolution

And the reason they shouldn’t be burnt goes deeper than what you know

The leafy giants mounted on wooden stocks are our friends.

Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash

Even more so are the microscopic algae. Although invisible, they are the Carnot engines driving life on Earth.

Photo by Mihály Köles on Unsplash

We owe more than half of the carbon fixation via photosynthesis to these itsy bitsy greens. Not to mention the oxygen that they generate.

Humanity should be thanking its stars that plants don’t work in banks or else our pockets may have never known the weight of cash. That’s the amount of debt we owe them.

Billions of years ago, Earth was an inhospitable large rock with ammonia, methane and other harmful gases in its atmosphere. Then, a bacteria evolved to possess a green protein pigment called chlorophyll which could trap the sunlight and generate oxygen. This bacteria divided and colonized the Earth making good use of the abundant energy resource coming from millions of kilometers away.

The gradual release of oxygen molecules into the atmosphere converted it into an oxidative milieu. Hence, methane and ammonia gave way to carbon dioxide and nitrogen.

One day, this bacteria decided to invade a bigger cell. The latter realized the former’s potential and sealed a deal to coexist in harmony. The bacteria became the chloroplast that we know today while the bigger cell became the plant cell. The plants (and algae) emerged as the recyclers of carbon dioxide, balancing what is produced by the animals. They incorporate the carbon dioxide into sugars via photosynthesis (thus, removing it from the atmosphere) while liberating oxygen. Win-win for us.

Photo by Guillaume de Germain on Unsplash

The plants and the algae are the lungs of the entire animal kingdom but the benefit cancels out when a plant dies. Its decomposition releases equal amounts of carbon (in the form of carbon dioxide) that it helped to fix and incorporate into its biomass during its entire lifetime. Moreover, decomposition is an oxygen-utilizing process.

A plant’s death offsets all that it contributed to us during the time it was alive.

How come then, did the early environment of the Earth change from reducing (containing methane, ammonia) to oxidative (containing oxygen, nitrogen) and maintained itself as the latter thenceforth?

The answer is that not all the plants decompose after death. Some change into carbonaceous or chalk deposits in the womb of the Earth. The former is termed ‘fossil fuel’.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

That oily liquid driving your cars and planes is nothing but the recesses of the plants and the dinosaurs burning in the engines. And their silent screams are purged out of the exhaust pipes as carbon dioxide.

Photo by Scott Greer on Unsplash

We are essentially destroying the excellent carbon trap that fossil fuels are. What took millions of years to form is being vanished in the blink of an eye. The carbon deposited beneath the soil is being returned back into the atmosphere as the chief harbinger of global warming — carbon dioxide.

Photo by Oscar Sutton on Unsplash

This is akin to reversing the ambience that history has formed over millions of years by bypassing the carbon into Earth’s womb far away from the reach of air and microbes that churn out greenhouse gases by decomposition.

We are deliberately destroying the environment that is conducive to our existence.

Not for nothing do the scientists believe that for all the mass extinctions that life has seen throughout its history on Earth, the next one will stand in contrast.

For all the previous species had no idea what they were marching towards, but humans do.

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

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Source: ‘The Ancestor’s Tale’ by Richard Dawkins