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Comment by bullen | Hacker News Reader

I have this theory that the hydrocarbons (which are just dead trees) are slowly feeding the magma in the earth when the tectonic plates move.

If that's true (although I don't get how that fire burns without oxygen) then our use of coal, oil and gas will eventually have serious effects?

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I. I just honestly don't understand what you're saying. Or where you would've come up with that. Or what the purpose would be. Or why you even think this exists.

What are you possibly basing this on?

Remember, in the 1800s people thought the Sun was burning coal.

How dare people try and use existing knowledge to formulate a hypothesis about something that was unknown.

Parent post is just wrong since we know how those processes work

This is clearly someone who thinks the mantle is an actual burning fire and doesn't understand that it is molten rock.

"I don't get how that fire burns without oxygen"

Well, it's not a fire...

Coal, oil, gas fossil fuels are all contained in the earth's crust and make up an extremely small fraction of it. The crust is just 1% of the volume of the planet and the mantle that the rigid plates float on is 84% of the volume.

I'd wager that all the crude fossil fuels in the world might be able to have a minor impact on a single decently sized volcano if it were all in one spot beneath it, but it's not.

The views above are primarily opinion formed off the cuff combined with a few minutes of research. I'm open to being shown that I am incorrect.

If the remaining hole in your theory is finding a way to explain a fire burning without oxygen, you might want to abandon your theory.

While life developed pretty much right away, multicellular life has existed for less than 15% of earth's existence. All of earth's coal is from an even more recent period when plants had newly developed wood and nothing could decompose it yet.

Earth seems to have been just fine without hydrocarbons for most of its existence.

That still gives us a 100 million years or so. Even our best drilling/mining tech is quite inefficient thankfully. The result of burning that energy on the surface will hit us way sooner.

That’s a hypothesis, one easily disproven

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