Here are some observations which show that soil does not originate with plant roots which break down rocks.

One of the first things kids are told in regard to science is that soil is created from rocks which are broken down by plant roots. That concept never did seem credible to me.

Soil is often several hundred feet deep. Supposedly, glaciers turn it under. But once the soil covers the rocks, the plant roots no longer contact the rocks. So how come the soil is usually deeper than plant roots go? Supposedly, rocks are churned to the top. But there is way too much complexity in soil for such churning effects. Churning would have to totally homogenize soil to convert rocks to soil.

Another problem is that soil doesn't have the same chemical composition as rocks. Soil is mostly clay, which is high in aluminum, while rocks are low in aluminum.

Here's proof that soil does not come from rocks. Along the Missouri River a few miles above the Big Bend Dam in South Dakota, there are Cambrian sea snails about a foot (30 cm) or more in diameter (similar to Nautilus). The shoreline is about 300 to 500 ft (100 to 150 m) below the surrounding terrain. If an ancient sea were the source, where did all the surrounding dirt come from.

The answers were created by an earthquake which occurred in the area in February 1983. Earthquakes were supposed to be impossible in the area, because there is supposedly a plate of granite under all of South Dakota at a depth of about 1800 feet (600 m). But the occurrence of the earthquake means there are two plates of granite rather than one.

The geological information in that earthquake is mind boggling. The quake occurred under a creek which separates west river gumbo from east river loam. The western half of South Dakota has a heavy, sticky soil called gumbo, while the eastern half has a much lighter loam. But there are places where the gumbo is on the east side of the river. The river did not strictly follow the line between the soil types.

It means the two soil types are on different tectonic plates. And the Precambrian snails were on a coastline, before the two plates collided. The collisions created no mountains, which means the plates were so light and thin that they matched perfectly and linked together without external evidence beyond the soil types. The collision would have occurred about one billion years ago, or perhaps a little longer, which is the age of the snails.

There were no plants or other terrestrial life during the Precambrian era. So the different soil types were not created by plant roots. If plants created the soil after the plates collided, why did they create two types of soil? Where the division is on the east side of the river, the two types of soil are a few feet from each other. The differences could not be due to plant roots.

What the U.S. Geological Survey said about my analysis was that the snails were probably from the cretaceous age (only about 90 million years ago) existing in Pierre shale and originally in shallow seas. Obnoxious. Those types of snails are known to be Cambrian, and they are not in Pierre shale, they are in Cambrian sediments. Sediments and shale have no similarities. Precambrian or Cambrian sediment is unmistakable, because it contains red and yellow masses created by stromatolites which metabolized iron and sulfur. Shallow seas could not be located 500 ft below the surrounding terrain, and they would not produce snails 30 cm in diameter.

The USGS also said that "Very small (3.0 magnitude or less) earthquakes in your area are probably caused by compressed land continuing to rebound from the last glacial period, not from tectonic activity."

Absurd. I don't remember the magnitude of the quake (probably about 5.5), but it split my woodframe house leaving the plaster cracked, and it cracked the concrete basement floor. Claiming that compressed land creates an earthquake, where there is supposedly no fault line, 10,000 years after a glacier is obnoxious.

The soil, of course, fell down from space, part of it while the earth was forming, and presumably some more after a planet exploded where the asteroid belt is. A significant amount also results from volcanic debri.

There's no such thing as Fossil Fuel Petroleum

There is some debate over the origins of so-called fossil fuels such as petroleum. The physics of energy settles the question.

Most scientists are claiming petroleum originated with biomass which underwent change under the ground. But there are critics, which include most Russian scientists, who claim petroleum has inorganic origins in carbonate which undergoes continual change very deep underground where heat and pressure act upon it, and then it moves toward the surface through cracks in the rocks.

The biomass origins looks ridiculous, because biomass is high in oxygen, while petroleum has no oxygen within it. To say that the oxygen was released due to time and pressure defies laws of chemistry and physics. The hydrogenated carbon of petroleum is in a much higher energy state than biomass. Where did the extra energy come from? Heat and pressure cannot provide the chemical energy.

There is a similar problem with the carbonate theory of the Russians. Carbonate is oxygenated and at a much lower energy state that petroleum. Heat and pressure cannot provide the chemical energy.

Heat is basically kinetic energy which has been randomized through molecules. Neither heat nor kinetic energy can be converted into chemical energy. Here's why: Chemical energy is in the motion of electrons which spin around atomic nuclei. Heat and kinetic energy are in the motion of nuclei. Electrons can influence the motion of nuclei, but nuclei cannot influence the motion of electrons. Basically, radiation is required to add energy to electrons.

This means heat and pressure deep underground cannot add chemical energy to either biomass or carbonate to convert them into the hydrocarbons of petroleum.

So where did the petroleum come from. Entropy is the continual dissipation of energy from concentrated sources to less concentrated states. Entropy indicates that the energy was added to hydrocarbons early in the creation of the solar system, and the energy has been dissipating every since.

Scientists were theorizing that the earth had a reducing atmosphere early on. Reducing means a high energy state due to hydrogen, rather than oxygen, being attached to carbon. The hydrocarbons of petroleum could have been created or transformed under such reducing conditions.

Recently, scientists have been finding evidence of oxygen and water on planet earth at least four billion years ago. This is surprising to scientists who have been assuming an early reducing atmosphere. But this finding does not necessarily rule out an early reducing atmosphere. There still could have been hundreds of millions of years of reducing atmosphere.

It appears that the energetics of hydrocarbons requires that they be created under reducing conditions, which must have occurred very early in planet earth's history; and then the reduced hydrocarbons had to be protected from oxygenation by being buried underground.

These assumption negate both the biomass and carbonate origins of the hydrocarbons of petroleum.

These principles also apply to coal. Through whatever means plant fossils end up in coal, the reduced energy of coal cannot have biological origins, because there is no chemical mechanism for increasing the energy state of the carbon without radiation. Biomass is in a lower chemical energy state than hydrocarbons.