Earth-Science Reviews, 22 (1985), 107-140

COLD CLIMATE PEAT FORMATION IN CANADA, AND ITS RELEVANCE TO LOWER PERMIAN COAL MEASURES OF AUSTRALIA

I.P. MARTINI¹ and W.A. GLOOSCHENKO²

¹Department of Land Resource Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada N1G 2W1
²Aquatic Ecology Division, National Water Research Institute, Burlington, Ontario, Canada L0R 1H0 

Canada is a vast, cold country. Large expanses of wetlands occur whose characters change predictably over continental distances along north-south temperature gradients and coastal-inland precipitation trends. The changing climatic conditions during the Holocene have influenced the initiation and rates of peat formation. For instance, most of the peats of south-central Canada are not older than 5000 years B.P. Those in the Arctic regions are fossil deposits of the hypsithermal times of 7-8000 years B.P., maintained at the surface because of the low rates of peat oxidation.
    An analysis of the environments of formation and of the stratigraphy of recent peats, which formed under cold to cold-temperate climate in Canada, forms the basis for a comparative study and a better understanding of the Permo-Carboniferous coals of Gondwanaland (Brazil, South Africa and Australia).
    Much of the stratigraphic complexities that occur in the peat sequences are blurred out during organic decomposition and metamorphism leading to coal formation. However, some of the major features of the sequences that develop in string fens (from basal sedge peats up to sedge-woody peats), and in boreal and cold-temperate bogs and swamps (from basal lacustrine deposits with some reworked and algal rich sediments, grading upward into sedge peats, to Sphagnum-sedge peat, to Sphagnum-woody or just woody peats) may be recognizable in banded coal seams. It is suggested that future detailed comparative microfacies analyses of the cold peat sequences of Canada and the Lower Permian coal seams of Australia will allow better reconstructions and understanding of ancient wetlands, without exclusively using the less appropriate, albeit better known, recent models of subtropical swamps.

[Home] [Books] [Papers] [Reports] [Conference Papers] [Supervised Theses] [Others]