How are fossil fuels made?
Fossil fuels are formed from the decomposition of living organisms. The most common examples are oil, natural gas, and coal. Oil and natural gas were created when plants and animals that died sank to the bottom of the oceans and rivers and were buried by sediment. Those sediments would have been things like stones in sand that washed into the water and then sink to the bottom. After time, there were many layers of sediment, and a great deal of pressure and heat were created. In this intense environment, the remains were decomposed.
Compounds are composed of two or more separate elements. So to make a compound simpler, you take them apart, so that each compound has fewer elements. Millions of years later, these compounds became oil or natural gas.
Coal is created in a similar way. For coal, it was trees or other plants that were buried in wet swamplands. When the plants died, they fell into the bottom of the swamps. As time went by, more plants died, and they formed a thick layer at the bottom of the water. These layers were then buried by dirt and water. The heat and pressure under, at the bottom of the piles, cause chemical reactions. In the end, after the oxygen was pushed out and mostly carbon remained, the materials that were left became coal. Oil, natural gases, and coal have all played an important part in helping the world develop since the Industrial Revolution, when modern machines were invented to make our lives better.
How are fossil fuels used?
In modern society, many places in the world get their electricity so easily by simply plugging in a cord into a wall, but that electricity must be created somewhere. The largest share of greenhouse gas emissions come from burning fossil fuels, mostly coal and natural gases, to make electricity.
In modern society, it is also very convenient and easy to get from one place to another. You can visit another city or another country in one day, but most forms of transportation also depend on fossil fuels. Planes, trains, cars, trucks, ships -- they burn oil products, such as gasoline, petrol, or diesel, to make them run. Factories that make everything that we fill our stores with, such as clothes, toys, electronics, and cars, all use the burning of fossil fuels to make their machines work and to heat their buildings.
What is the impact of fossil fuels?
As we can see, most of us depend on burning fossil fuels for making almost everything we use and taking us almost everywhere we go. But burning so many fossil fuels does have an impact on the environment. It pushes all the carbon dioxide that was stored in the Earth up into the atmosphere in a way that would not happen naturally in the carbon cycle. And as we learned before, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. So, when there is more of it floating around the atmosphere, that means more heat is trapped from escaping our greenhouse -- the Earth's atmosphere.
How it affects the ecosystem?
Greenhouse gases have far-ranging environmental and health effects. They cause climate change by trapping heat, and they also contribute to respiratory disease from smog and air pollution. Extreme weather, food supply disruptions, and increased wildfires are other effects of climate change caused by greenhouse gases. The typical weather patterns we've grown to expect will change; some species will disappear; others will migrate or grow. (Nunez, 2019)