The Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism (2018)

broken plants, washed into it by inundations or freshes of former rivers, that the heavier earthy matters which accompanied such accumulations (in the same way as in the floating islands or snags of the great American rivers), sank to the bottom, whilst the lighter plants floated and formed the upper stratum….” Murchison’s straightforward mat description influenced German paleobotanist Heinrich Göppert (1848) who also favored sea-bed accumulation of coal. Like Murchison, he was impressed with the vast extent and continuity of structure within coal. Göppert found it difficult thinking of such a mass being floated in all at once, yet coal’s continuity of structure seems explainable by no other means. In general agreement with Murchison, the German mineralogist Carl Naumann (1854) understood rivers to be very important in bringing floating vegetation to the ocean where it collected into rafts that washed up on shore. EARLY FORMULATION OF THE FLOATING MAT MODEL The Swiss-American paleobotanist Leo Lesquereux left a profound influence on understanding peat and coal. He has been called the father of American paleobotany. As a young man in Europe he specialized in botany and ecology of European peat bogs including floating peat (what he often called “floating carpet” or “mat”). In 1848 he accompanied Louis Agassiz by moving to the United States, where he worked for state geologic surveys in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky to describe Carboniferous fossil plants. Lesquereux (1870, p. 452) wrote, “It is my belief, the genus Stigmaria does not represent tree roots, but floating stems, of which species of the genus Sigillaria constitute the flowers or fruit- bearing stems.” Concerning the ontogeny of Stigmaria growth, Lesquereux affirmed the opinion of Goldenberg, “The stems could grow independent for a considerable length of time as floating and sterile, or bear erect flowering stems or trunks when the ground was solid enough to support trees” (Lesquereux 1880, p. 512). In subsequent publications he sketched a fresh-water depositional model for Carboniferous peat. Lesquereux (1885, p. 120) wrote, “Most of the land surface was then a vastness of swamps, in which the first growth, generally floating or creeping plants, was essentially composed of a particular species, the Stigmaria , whose immensely long stems ... were woven together, like the thin, matted, floating stems of the Sphagnum of the present age, into an immense woven mat or thick carpet, over which the luxuriant land vegetation of the coal soon spread itself.” Coal formed from the raft as it sank of its own weight into the water beneath and became a deposit wholly submerged. In addition to floating mat deposits on submerged surfaces within the fresh-water swamps, Lesquereux also imagined in situ peat deposited on upland surfaces. As Lesquereux was linking observations that favored coal from floating mats, the French School of coal petrologists (Grand’Eury, 1882; Fayol, 1887) suggested the Franco-Belgium coal field was a series of lakes into which drifted detritus was accumulated to form multiple coal beds. A French railway engineer Ludovic Breton (1885) disagreed. Breton proposed that the Franco-Belgium coal beds were deposited from floating islands. Each coal bed was accumulated in fresh water from a floating vegetation island that grounded on the surface of sedimentation. Had Breton supposed coal to be detritus settled underneath a floating mat, his explanation might have impacted the French School. Instead, Breton’s work was largely ignored. The British and American mining engineer and geologist William S. Gresley likely had more direct experience observing British and American Carboniferous coal than any of the geologists or botanists mentioned previously. He was the first to document coal balls in North America. Also, he can be called the father of coal petrology in North America. Short geologic papers by Gresley (1885, 1887, 1894a, 1894b, 1899), showed that coal composition, coal parting structure, coal underclay, and coal roof-bed architecture argue against coal bed formation in swamps. His competence in coal is demonstrated by perceptive questions (Gresley 1894b). How could a single three-eighths-inch-thick shale parting be deposited within the Pittsburgh Coal Bed throughout a 15,000 square mile area? Even more important to Gresley was the preservation question. How could the continuity of that parting be preserved as an equally widespread bench of vegetation was formed directly above that parting? He was diligent in search of Stigmaria associated with Pittsburgh Coal, and he finally found one broken and transported fragment near Elizabeth, Pennsylvania, the first to be reported or published throughout the 15,000 square mile area of mining within Pittsburgh Coal. Beginning with the petrology of the coal bed, he reverse-engineered the depositional environment: “... the evidence points to the formation of coal on the floor of an expanse of water, by vegetable matter sinking down from floating ‘islands’ of vegetation, which may have been of very large size” (Gresley 1894a). Like Göppert, Gresley marveled at the immensity of scale. Gresely (1894b) was not settled if it was a marine or freshwater condition, but was certain “... vegetation of such character as thrived in luxuriant profusion upon the surface of the water ... living afloat and dying and decaying, falling through the water.” He agreed with the French School of allochthonists that coal was a detrital accumulation, but the French School, especially after Breton’s work, did not postulate sedimentation from the mat. The German botanist Otto Kuntze (1884, 1895) benefited greatly from both Naumann’s and Lesquereux’s ideas, but apparently Kuntze had no exposure to Gresley’s short publications or Breton’s monograph. Kuntze classified peat-forming environments after Naumann, but he went significantly beyond Lesquereux in stressing the importance of floating vegetation mats in peat deposition. Lesquereux and Kuntze were both botanists approaching the floating mat idea. They both recognized Stigmaria to be a floating stem with “water leaves” (definitely not a root in soil). Lesquereux applied the mat idea just to limnic fresh-water peats and the resulting interpretation of cannel coal, while Kuntze supposed widespread marine floating mats (see Figure 2) that could deposit both cannel coal (homogenous, fine lithotypes) and humic coal (banded, coarser-textured lithotypes). Kuntze supposed marine- influenced humic coals of England and United States (what Naumann called paralic coals) to form from a marine forest living on a floating peat substrate. Kuntze and Lesquereux differed somewhat on the origin of underclay, but both believed that a peat mat sank en masse in an aqueous environment onto the submerged clay layer to form a coal bed. Kuntze postulated a Carboniferous marine floating forest biome with lycopod trees being only one of several mat species. Austin and Sanders ◀ Historical survey of floating mat model ▶ 2018 ICC 280