Peat Bog facts

While investigating facts about Peat Bog Man and Peat Bog Mummies, I found out little known, but curios details like:

Ireland has 3 Peat fired power plants. Using peat taken from Irish bogs, its more polluting than Coal and is so inefficient it is subsided by the state.

how peat bogs are formed?

Bog butter—an ancient waxy substance often found buried in peat bogs that was used as a way of preserving butter in ancient Ireland. The butter would gain flavor notes from its surroundings that were namely described as “gamey,” “moss,” “funky,” “pungent,” and “salami.”

What is meant by peat bog?

In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what is a peat bog gcse. Here are 17 of the best facts about Peat Bog Fairies and Peat Bog Soldiers I managed to collect.

what's peat bog?

1. There's such thing as a Quaking Bog, where bog vegetation builds up on top of water or very wet peat. Walking there can cause the ground to ripple and trees to sway.

2. There is an unexplored peat bog the size of England in the Congo

3. An Irish mummified corpse from 392 - 201 BC was so perfectly preserved in a peat bog that archaeologists could tell that he used "hair gel"; his hair contained a substance made from vegetable oil mixed with resin from pine trees found in Spain/France, proving that imports/trade was done.

4. Peter Reyn-Bardt who confessed to having murdered his estranged wife 22 years earlier, after a woman's remains were found in a peat bog. Carbon-14 dating of the skull fragment later returned a date c. 250 AD - the wife's remains were never found

5. The head of a well-studied bog body, was picked up by a peat cutter, joking that it was a dinosaur egg. A year later, the same worker found a "piece of wood" and threw it at his coworker. It was the leg of another bog body, Lindow Man.

6. People occasionally find containers of butter in peat bogs that are hundreds of years old

7. About the Tollund man, a well-preserved naturally mummified body found in a peat bog in modern day Denmark in 1950. The man is believed to have lived around 375-210 B.C during the pre-roman iron age in Scandinavia and could have died as a religious sacrifice.

8. The term 'Jack O' Lantern' was originally a nickname for strange lights seen over peat bogs in the 1600s, which many mistook to be ghosts or fairies. It wasn't until people started carving turnips in the 1800s that the term got its modern meaning.

9. Bog-wood is a material from trees that have been buried in peat bogs and preserved from decay by the acidic and anaerobic bog conditions, sometimes for hundreds or even thousands of years. Bog-wood represents the early stages in the fossilisation of wood

10. A peat cutter in an Irish bog discovered a still-fleshed "bog body" dating to the Early Bronze Age, around 2000 B.C.

Why are peat bogs important?

You can easily fact check why are peat bogs being destroyed by examining the linked well-known sources.

Mountain Bike Bog Snorkeling is a sport where competitors ride lead weighted bikes through 2 meter deep peat bogs.

During the early Triassic period coal deposits did not form. This is called the Coal Gap. Several possible explanations exist including the extinction of peat forming plants in bogs, mires and swamps. - source

Turbary is the ancient right to cut turf, or peat, for fuel on a particular area of bog. Turf was widely used as fuel for cooking and domestic heating. In some places, the right of turbary belongs not to an individual person, dwelling or plot of land, but to a particular hearth and chimney.

Marshes are nutrient-rich wetlands that support a variety of reeds and grasses, while swamps are defined by their ability to support woody plants and trees. Bogs are characterized by their poor soil and high peat content, while fens have less peat and more plant life than a bog. - source