November 27, 2003
Thicker and more absorbant
Chariot of the bogs
If one was to write down the recipe for making a bog, it wouldn't take too long, or be too complicated. Find a stretch of land that is not too rich in minerals. Make sure it gets plenty of rainfall. If there are trees, chop them down, so that the rain can get directly at the soil. Let the rain gradually leech the minerals out of the soil, so that the ground becomes poorer in quality. After a while, you'll see Spagnum moss starting to grow. It has an important quality - it can hold many times it's own mass in water - it is literally a sponge. As the Spagnum grows and spreads, the bog begins to form. It begins a self-perpetuating cycle - the already-wet ground prevents other plants from growing. As the moss decays, it forms a mulch that discourages anything other than more moss growing. Soon, the once leafy forest is one large soggy puddle - leave it for a thousand years or so, and you've got a bog (if you want to create that really black, dense turf that burns the best, leave it for 2 or 3 thousand years. If you want coal, push a mountain on top of it and give it another million years).
See, it's easy. One way that you probably wouldn't go about creating a bog is to find an existing bog, dig it up, transport it to a ten acre stretch of another bog, and then dump the first bog on top of it. Well, you might if you were an oil company. Yes, we're talking about the latest chapter in the Bellanaboy story. Last year, An Bord Pleanala overruled a decision by Mayo County council and denied Shell permission to build an onshore station for bringing ashore the natural gas that will be pumped from the Corrib Field, off the Mayo coast. Their objection centred on the plan by Shell to basically bulldoze a large pile of peat into a pile - thus clearing the site. An Bord Pleanala were worried about slippage, and by coincidence, there was a peat landslide just down the road in Pollatomish, and also in Derrybrien since that decision.
So Shell proposed to move the bog. A local campaigner described the plan as lunacy but she was probably just being nice. The problem is that a bog is just like a very large, quivering blacmange, and the thought of dropping one jelly on top of another conjures up the image of a very large and messy splat. The new plan involves 25 weeks, at 400 truck journeys per day, of ferrying peat from the old location to the new. The oil company will probably make billions from the natural gas field - I think they can probably come up with something that won't wash away in the first bout of heavy rain.
Posted by Monasette at November 27, 2003 11:27 PM