Can someone explain how trees, animals, etc formed the oil that lies two miles below the surface here in the Bakken formation?
What about the forests and dinosaurs on Saturn's moon Titan, nearly 900 million miles from the Sun? That moon -- the largest in the solar system -- is awash in hydrocarbon oceans.
The biologicals trapped in the sediment were laid down the same way all that sediment that formed the rock was laid down. It took a lot of time to build up that much sediment. The Bakken exists in the Devonian and early Mississippian period of sedimentation, about 400 million years old. You need to remember the earth didn't look like it did today in that time period.
If the Bakken formation is around 350 million years old, it only required an inch of new sediment every 2762 years to build up to a depth of two miles in all that time.
As I understand it, the standard theory is that oil was formed from algae, not trees and animals.