The other was a chemist. He discovered it based on the time it takes for coal and oil to form. He said, "If it does not form quickly, it doesn't form at all." He decided a world wide flood could cause the conditions necessary to produce both. In a question and answer session he said a better question would be, "Where did all the land come from?"
But yet there are deposits at various stages in the process from plant matter to peat to lignite to anthracite, indicating deposition at widely divergent dates, and we have good evidence for the mechanisms leading from one to another, including time, heat and pressure, and the long period over which these take place..
