Coal—A Window to Past Climate and Vegetation

149 Pages·2020·12.204 MB·English

by  Miryam Glikson-Simpson

Miryam Glikson-Simpson
Coal—A Window
to Past Climate
and Vegetation
—
Coal A Window to Past Climate and Vegetation
Miryam Glikson-Simpson
—
Coal A Window to Past
Climate and Vegetation
123
Miryam Glikson-Simpson
Palmwoods,QLD,Australia
ISBN978-3-030-44471-6 ISBN978-3-030-44472-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44472-3
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In honor of Prof. G. H. Taylor Founder
of modern coal petrology. Supervisor of
my Ph.D. thesis, 1982; then Director of the
Centre for Resource and Environmental
Studies at the Australian National University
Acknowledgements
ThesamplesforthepollenstudywerecollectedfromtheGeologicalSurveyofWestern
Australia’s core shed in Collie, and assistance and advice of Prof. B. E. Balme is
gratefullyacknowledged. The UniversityofWestern Australia providedlaboratories
andresearchfacilitiesthatenabledmetocarryoutthisstudy.
StudyandresearchofSpontaneousCombustionwerecarriedoutattheUniversity
ofQueenslandincollaborationwiththeDepartmentofMiningEngineeringduring
mytimeonthestaffoftheDepartmentofEarthSciences.
Many thanks to Dr. Judy Owen for palynological discussions, review and
constructive comments.
Thank you to Ann Ferguson and Omair Raza for valued technical assistance.
Dr. Petra van Steenbergen’s encouragement is much appreciated.
Special thanks are due to Emeritus Professor Rod Simpson for continuous
encouragement and advice on many technical aspects arising throughout the
laborious writing of this book.
Many thanks to Senior Editor Mrs. Margaret Deignan and Dr. Madanagopal
Deenadayalan who made this work a reality.
vii
Introduction
Gondwana, which includes Australia, South Africa, India, Antarctica and South
America, holds the largest coal deposits. These coal deposits were formed from
vegetation growing in the vast swamps that occupied huge slowly subsiding
depressionsleftbareaftertheretreatingglaciersattheendofthecarboniferous.The
early Permian climate was cold, with freezing winters and humid cold summers.
Cold temperate climate followed for some time until the warming up towards the
end of the Permian. The vegetation that gave rise to the vast coal deposits (Fig. 1)
was predominantly the Glossopteris flora which was composed of trees varying in
size and shedding their leaves in winter. The trunks of these plants and large
quantities of their leaves settled in the marshes and degraded into peat which
accumulated, and through diagenetic processes, subsidence and compression
formed the coal deposits. The Permian vegetation shed their pollen and spores as
well, and these were deposited with the rest of organic remains. Pollen and spores
are resistant to degradation and their fossil remains are used to reconstruct the
environment and landscape at the time of deposition, the climatic conditions and
type of vegetation. The pollen and spores were extracted from coals that were
formed from plant remains deposited during the Permian era that signifies the last
period of the Palaeozoic between 298 and 250 million years ago: The end of the
Permian marks a dramatic change in the flora in the wake of a meteorite impact in
Brazil and extensive flood volcanism in Siberia and China, which triggered the
release of immense sulphur-di-oxide fumes and carbon-di-oxide, resulting in the
greatest known mass extinction offauna and certain flora.
Pollen and spores in this book are described according to a devised and uni-
versally accepted systematic code; a critical approach of the traditional systematic
classification is undertaken. Furthermore, pollen and spores are discussed in terms
of their botanical affinity and are compared with pollen and spores of living
Australian plants. Some of the Permian pollen/spores show close resemblance to
those of Australian plants growing today. These signify continuity, whereas many
othersbecameextinctoveraperiodoftimeasaresultofclimaticchangesoccurring
in their environment. Ignoring the affinity offossil pollen/spores to existing plants
on one hand, the attempt to reconstruct past environments is incompatible.
ix
x Introduction
Fig.1 4mthickcoalseamintheBowenBasin,Queensland,Australia
The composition of plant assemblages and their changes over time reflect
changes inthedepositionalenvironmentsofthecoal-forming plants,whichinturn
followtheclimaticchanges.Theseareasubjectofthisbook.Comparisontopresent
day environments and climates is made possible by identifying the remains of
ancient flora.
Introduction xi
Over 200 samples from bore holes in the Perth Basin and the Collie–Wilga
Basins of Western Australia ranging from the Lower Permian to Upper Permian
were processed for pollen analysis. These yieldedgroups of pollen and spores that
represent the vegetation of the time.
Assemblagesaswellasindividualspeciescanalsobeusedasmarkerssignifying
specific stratigraphic horizons in time and space.
Over 70 species of pollen and spores are described in detail, some of those
described in earlier studies are compared with the ones in the present study, their
affinity discussed and some new forms of pollen previously unknown are also
described.
Contents
1 General Review of Permian Sediments in Western Australia . . . . . . 1
1.1 Previous Studies of Permian Pollen/Spores in the Collie
and South Perth Basins. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2 The Collie Basin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.3 Wilga Basin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.4 South Perth Basin (Sue-1 Bore). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.4.1 The Coals of the Collie–Wilga and Perth Basins . . . . . . . . 6
1.5 Methods of Study. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.5.1 Classification. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.5.2 Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.5.3 Bodies Lacking Haptotypic Features: Acritarchs . . . . . . . . 11
1.5.4 Saccate Pollen Grains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.6 Monosaccate Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.7 Disaccate Forms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.8 Striatiti. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2 Systematic Descriptions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
3 The Microfloral Assemblages—Their Environmental
and Climatic Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
4 Spontaneous Combustion of Coal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
4.2 Naturally Occurring Spontaneous Combustion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
4.3 Methods Used in Evaluation of Coals in Their Susceptibility
to Spontaneous Combustion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
xiii