Fire Creates Worlds: A Unified Theory of Fossil Fuel Genesis and Earth's 500-Million-Year Material Cycle Based on the "Fireball" Hypothesis

Darwin's Origin of Species explained how life evolves. This paper tries to answer another question: where did the coal, oil, and natural gas that drive human industrial civilization actually come from? For more than a hundred years, geology textbooks have given a simple answer: ancient forests fell into swamps and were compressed for hundreds of millions of years into coal; marine plankton died and sank to the seafloor, turning into oil. This explanation is easy to understand and teach, so it has persisted. But the problem is that it does not hold up against basic physics, does not match the chemical signatures, and does not fit what we actually see in the strata. This paper proposes a new interpretive framework—the "Fireball" hypothesis. The core logic is straightforward: in ancient times, every few tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, the Earth experienced super-wildfires that swept across entire continents. These fires burned forests to ash. The ash—rich in potassium, iron, and phosphorus—was washed by rain into lakes and seas, triggering explosive algal blooms. Algae pulled carbon dioxide back from the atmosphere, died, and sank to the bottom, together with fire-modified charcoal and animal remains, forming thick organic-rich deposits. Over millions of years, geothermal heat slowly cooked these deposits into coal, oil, and natural gas. The key insight is this: the carbon in coal and oil does not primarily come from the burned trees themselves—that carbon was released back into the atmosphere during the fire. The carbon was actually fixed by algae that exploded in population after receiving the ash nutrients. Ash is the trigger; algae are the carbon sink. During the Cambrian and Ordovician periods, there were no trees on land at all. Yet those strata contain hundreds of billions of tons of oil and gas reserves. This is natural geological evidence that oil and gas can form without trees. The 2019 Australian wildfires provided a live demonstration: satellite observations showed that after the fires, ash plumes reached the Southern Ocean, phytoplankton biomass surged, and carbon fixation reached nearly half of the fire's carbon emissions. The entire process was observed in real time. Compared to the traditional "trees-to-coal, plankton-to-oil" theory, this framework explains more observations—the algal biomarkers in coal seams, the high inertinite content, the three types of kerogen, the authigenic minerals in coal-bearing strata—all fit. Moreover, the framework is testable and falsifiable: if you don't find those indicators in the strata, then the theory does not apply to that formation.The significance of this theory, at a minimum, is to provide a new perspective on fossil fuel genesis; at a maximum, it reveals a fundamental law of Earth's surface material cycling: fire destroys one era while simultaneously storing energy for the next. The coal and oil burned by industrial civilization are essentially the energy of wildfires from hundreds of millions of years ago, sealed in the strata and finally unearthed and reignited today. Earth has never been a place of quiet, gradual accumulation. It is a planet periodically wrapped in fire. Destruction and creation, here, are the same thing.