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Ancient Amputation

BBC Inside Science

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Is That How You Get Charcoal?

I've made charcoal and I made it by heating up wood in a barrel where there wasn't enough oxygen for the wood to burn. To a normal eye, they just look like small black flakes, but you can take them and reconstruct a picture of the temperatures and pressures that must have formed them. The more graphite structure of the charcoal is, the lighter it looks under the microscope.

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