Coal

Transcript:

Sarah: All right, so over here, we're in our sedimentary rock research site in our beautiful mesa, and Holly is standing by a kind of interesting and important rock, I think. So if we let's make some space -- oof I have so much stuff in my inventory, let's make a little bit of space and see if we can collect this, and see what it is. There we go, we have some coal. So what do we want to say about coal? 

Kim: Well, coal is a very interesting rock, like you say. It's made up of plant material that has degraded over time and actually makes this this rock that you could actually burn if you could believe it. 

Sarah: I can. Now I know that humans have been burning coal for a really, really long time in our history, and I know that that does not always end well. So do we want to talk about maybe some of the the downsides of burning coal for so many years? 

Kim: Yeah, no, for sure, so coal is fossil fuel. It will generate some elements and chemicals into the atmosphere that over time can certainly speed up global warming, so it's one of the ones that is still very heavily used in many countries, but I think there is somewhat of a good movement towards stopping burning coal in most places. 

Sarah: I know that my aunt really, really loves to watch the show The Crown on Netflix, and they had a whole episode about the really bad smog that came from all of the coal burning. 

Kim: That's right. 

Sarah: So I thought that was really neat. So we have our material reducer over here, we've seen it a couple times in the world, and I just want to stick the coal in and see what happens. All right, so we have hydrogen carbon oxygen and nitrogen. 

Kim: That sounds very good yeah that's kind of the sort of the building blocks of plants, really, and as it decomposes and compacts it turns into coal rocks over a really, really, long time -- millions of years