[centurion316]

I call BS on this one. How do you get “beds of shale” from a single geologic event? These beds are laid down over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. Perhaps a major earthquake or landside might form a local bedding layer, but world wide bedding layers? I don’t think so. The total biomass from a single event is not going to produce much oil. Again, you need thousands, if not millions of years of accumulation, preferably in an oxygen free environment.

[muawiyah]

You were taught it was a gradual process taking millions of years. This researcher suggests that your teachers were in error ~ they simply took a guess.

Now, about the amount of biomass involved ~ counting in the vast storehouse of living biomass in the rocks that make up the ocean floor, there's a whale of a lot of stuff down there. Hot, steaming lava could have "cooked" the critters out of the rocks where they reside and allowed them to simply flow to sandstone and other types of rocks, and then buried them.