[nightdriver]

"So, how'd the coal get so deep ?"

That has always been a more fascinating mystery to me than the Biblical Flood.

Here you have a layer of coal with basalt rock (cooled molten lava) on top of it, sealed up for the ages. Not only that, there may be another layer underneath the first one.

Had the hapless forest (or other plant life) been left on the surface of the ground, it would have slowly rotted, oxidized and gone away, never to be seen again.

Those layers of coal could tell us much more about the pre-history of the earth if we were interested enough to study them.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

I have stood on a coal seam and looked up at eighty feet of shale wall (in an open pit mine) and wondered how long it took for the coal to solidify and how the heck all that shale got on top of it. A further puzzle; just above the shale, in certain locations contained in a clay band, was another thin seam of coal...

[cookcounty]

""So, how'd the coal get so deep ?" That has always been a more fascinating mystery to me than the Biblical Flood. Here you have a layer of coal with basalt rock (cooled molten lava) on top of it, sealed up for the ages. Not only that, there may be another layer underneath the first one. Had the hapless forest (or other plant life) been left on the surface of the ground, it would have slowly rotted, oxidized and gone away, never to be seen again. Those layers of coal could tell us much more about the pre-history of the earth if we were interested enough to study them."

Either way, it points to catastrophic source for coal, not a 260 million year process.