Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Petrified Wood

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

Petrified wood isn't just hard wood. Listen in today to learn all about this unique process. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, I'm Chelsea Paredi. Do you feel chronic existential dread but love talking about delicious snacks? Call me! My podcast is relaunching! Do you fear wild, dangerous animals to the point where you're constantly watching attack videos and reading articles about wild animal tech survivors or those who succumb to attack? Call in! We can also discuss reality shows and emergency room footage. Listen to Call Chelsea Paredi on Will Therill's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hey, and welcome to the short stuff.

I'm Josh Chuck Jerry, Dave Spirit Go. Hey, can I give the quickest music shout out? Making this longer. I guess. I know it's a shorty, but I just quickly wanna say, I went to see Mud Honey last night. Mm-hmm, sure. And boy oh boy, if Mud Honey comes through your town

on this tour and you have any love for that band from the old days, go, go, go. Okay. These guys just blistered you for 28 songs, like it was 1995, and through their stuff down, and Mark Arm went to the mic and said, we still mud-honey, and they got out of there.

It was amazing. It blew me away in my expectations already high. But you can tell that they're aged because he was like, this microphone's too expensive for me to drop here. He really thought that through. God, this guys are killer. Good, good, good shout out, Chuck. They petrified my ears.

How about that for a segue? Oh, that's a good one because we're talking about petrified wood. So that's like a perfect segue. I don't know if you knew that or Oh, that's a good one because we're talking about petrified wood. So that's like a perfect segway. I don't know if you knew that or not. This is a good guess. So petrified wood, whenever I think of that, I think of like the petrified forest. And now I always just thought I was like really hard wood.

I knew the deal. Yeah. So wrong. And I should know this because we did a really great episode on fossils. But what a petrified wood is, it's just fossilized wood, rather than an old crusty trilobite or something like that. It's an orcrestic tree that's now mineral, not wood. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty remarkable.

It's what happens when the organic stuff within a tree, and not always a tree, but any kind of like woody material, but we like to think of trees when we talk about petrified things. But this stuff is, you know, it's fossilized from the inside out and it's replaced by minerals. A lot of times very heavy in silica, and that process is called per mineralization, and it usually takes millions of years, but as we'll see in a second, sometimes it can happen in decades or hundreds of years given the right conditions. My friend, I saw that it can happen according to one study.

Whoa, wait a minute. Two days? They found between seven and 36 years is the fastest. Wow. Seven years. I didn't like incredible. It might have a job as long as it takes for this thing to be petrified

and then you move on somewhere else. And if you're lucky, the trees already petrified, yeah. Yeah, so here's the deal. Usually when a tree dies, it rot. It decomposes and it just decays, you know, like we've talked about in plenty of times before, microorganisms get in there,

break all that stuff down, and it eventually just becomes part of the earth again. Sometimes though, a tree might fall, and very, very quickly, it is buried over by something that shields it from oxygen, whether it be volcanic ash or mud or silt or something like that. Or honey or very nice. But it gets buried under that such that cuts it away, cuts it off from oxygen. Oxygen is the big factor in that natural rot to decay. And so if that's not around, all of a sudden it's decomposing really, really slowly and so slowly that those minerals that it's buried in can seep in.

Yeah, and those minerals are really important because if you don't have minerals, what you end up with is coal and then eventually diamonds, right? Yeah. Like the decomposition is going to happen one way or another. It's just gonna take much longer without oxygen. If you have minerals, however, though, those minerals that mineral rich like mud or water,

whatever that's present, can start to seep into that dead tree, right? It gets in the pores, it gets in all the nooks and crannies and the vascular stuff and all that. And as that rot happens, as the tree itself actually decays, what remains is that hardened mineral, usually silica, which eventually over time forms quartz. And because it's filled up those pores so completely, even though there's the trees itself is not left any longer, a mineral rock version of that tree is left behind. That's petrified tree.

Yeah, and we mentioned that it takes a very, very long time normally, but you said it's little less seven years, and that is either one or two or both things happen. Either the tree, everything is basically sped up. Either the tree is buried very, very fast instead of more slowly by this stuff, and it's cut off from that oxygen much, much quicker. Or if there's just tons and tons and tons of the mineral instead of just sort of a regular amount. Right. I say we take a break and come back and talk a little more about petrified wood. How about that? Let's do it. as relaunching. Subscribe and treat yourself to sound effects like this. And this, have you ever been attacked by a bear? Yeah. And moments like this. I have an awful sleep in front of the

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It's gonna be great. I really hope you like it. You can listen to JoJo Siwa now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck, I'm not sure if you remember or not, but we're talking petrified wood. And we just explained how it works. Okay? So there are places in this world that just have the right conditions for petrified wood

to have formed. And there's a bunch of them in the United States. Most famously, there's a very large national park fossil forest, petrified forest, in Yellowstone, which is pretty cool. But if you allow me to digress, I found another one that I think is even cooler. It's in Montana, which I think the Yellowstone runs into Montana too. It's called Galatin National Park. It's a petrified forest like the real deal.

So in Yellowstone, you got a bunch of petrified logs laying around. And what that is is evidence of one way that wood can become petrified. They basically became covered by sediment and river muck after falling into a river and going downstream and basically clogging up the mouth of the river, whatever, right? At Gallatin, it's a true petrified forest because the trees are still upright and we're petrified in place where they were growing. And what's even nuttier than that is because the site was so ripe for creating petrified wood, it happened again and again and again. So what they found is there was an ancient volcano that just kept covering the area in ash

every several yeah every several tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years and every time it, that forest became petrified. And little by little, after one forest was petrified, a new forest would grow above it, that would get petrified and so on and so forth. There's 2,000 vertical feet of petrified forests, one on top of the other, in Galaton, in Montana. Isn't that nuts? That is unbelievable. You can't, there are laws. You can't just take that stuff out and take it home because it looks awesome. And if you're sitting there thinking like,

all right, this is kind of cool, but like kind of what's the big deal, guys. Well, the new, my friend, have never seen petrified wood because petrified wood is amazing looking. It takes on colors because each mineral will end up, you know, filling those pores in that vascular system and turning that wood

So you have that like the beautiful Structure like when you cut a cross-section of a tree and those beautiful rings and the shapes right the way the lines like that stuff Remains, but all of a sudden it's green and it's red and it looks amazing because depending on the mineral, it will give you a different color and a different shade and you polish that stuff up and it looks like some kind of a beautiful gemstone when it in fact, it is fossilized tree. Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

So you've got things like, I think hematite creates pink or red tints. Native iron creates the greenish color. Pyright. Good band name, by the way. Native iron. Sure, totally. Pyright creates black shades.

Another thing that you very frequently see is you'll see a petrified log in it. I mean, it looks like a log. The bark is all like very clear. It just looks like a log that fell over. But on the outside, it's sprinkle of a fairy dust. This is actually just little silica coverage, like dustings of silica.

And again, if you picked up that log, you'd be like, this is a really heavy log because it's not wood any longer. It's quartz and quartz is much heavier than wood. Yeah, pretty amazing. Those forests that you mentioned are the ones that are well-known for having tons and tons of vertical structures. But you can find petrified wood all over the world.

Anyway, there's trees. There's probably going to be some example of petrified wood that has been found there. Yeah. And one other thing, a lot of times it looks like somebody came along and chopped up the petrified wood into logs. That actually happens because they're so brittle once they become fossilized, any pressure from the earth, the movement of the earth, the pressure from the dirt above them or whatever

it can snap, but when they snap, they snap so cleanly, it looks like they were, you know, solid. Oh, solid. Oh, wow. Yeah, pretty cool. Petrified wood, amazing. Mud honey, amazing. There you go. We still short stuff.

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