November 8, 2023 • 10 mins
Petrified wood isn't just hard wood. Listen in today to learn all about this unique process.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, Chuck, Jerry,
Dave Spirit go hey.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Can I give the quickest music shout out?
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Making this yunger?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I guess I know it's a shorty, but I just
quickly want to say I went to see mud Honey
last night.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
HM.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
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 twenty eight songs like
it was nineteen ninety five and threw their stuff down
(00:45):
and Mark Arm went to the mic and said, we
still mud Honey and they got out of there and
it was amazing. It blew me away. And my expectations
are already high.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
So but you can tell that they're aged because you
was like, this microphone's too expensive for me to drop here.
He really thought that through God, this guy's are killer
good right good good shout out Chuck.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
They petrified my ears? How about that for a segment.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
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 not.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
This is a good guess.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
So petrified wood. Whenever I think of that, I think
of like the petrified forests, and I always just thought
it was like really hard wood.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
I never knew the deal.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yeah, so wrong. And I should know this because we
did a really great episode on fossils. But what petrified
wood is? This just fossilized wood Rather than an old
crusty chylobite or something like that. It's an old crusty
tree that's now mineral not wood.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty remarkable. It's you know, 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. Yeah, but this stuff is, you know,
it's fossilized from the inside out and it's replaced by minerals,
(02:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
My friend I saw that it can happen according to
one study.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Well wait a minute, two days.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
They found between seven and thirty six years is the fastest. Wow,
seven years.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
It's like incredible.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
You might have a job as long as it takes
for this thing to be petrify and then you move
on somewhere else. And if you're like, the tree's already petrified,
you know.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Yeah, So here's the deal. Usually when a tree dies,
it rots, it decomposes, and it just decays, you know,
like we've talked about plenty of times before micro organisms
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
(03:06):
buried over by something that shields it from oxygen, whether
it be volcanic ash or mud or silt or something
like that or mud honey or haha, very nice, but
it gets buried under that such that cuts it away,
cuts off from oxygen. Oxygen is the big factor in
that natural rot to decay, and so if that's not
(03:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Right.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Yeah, Like the decomposition is going to happen one way
or another. It's just going to 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 day tree, right gets in
the pores, It gets in all the nooks and crannies
(04:05):
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 poores so completely,
even though there's the trees itself is not left any longer,
(04:28):
a mineral rock version of that tree is left behind.
That's a petrified tree.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah. And you know, we mentioned that it takes a
very very long time normally, but you said as little
as 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
(04:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
I say we take a break and come back and
talk a little more about petrified wood. How about that.
Let's do it, so, Chuck, I'm not sure if you
(05:34):
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
(05:58):
is pretty cool. But I feel to digress. I found
another one that I think is even cooler. It's in Montana,
which I think Yellowstone runs into Montana too, and it's
called Gallatin National Park, and it's a petrified forest like
the real deal. So in Yellowstone you got a bunch
of like petrified logs laying around, and what that is
(06:19):
is evidence of one way that that wood can become petrified.
They basically became covered by sediment and rivermuck after falling
into a river and going downstream and basically clogging up
the mouth of the river or whatever. Right a Gallatin,
it's a true petrified forest because the trees are still
(06:40):
upright and were 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
(07:03):
in ash every year, yeah, every several tens of thousands
or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, and
every time it did, that forest became petrified. And little
by little, after you know, one forest was petrified, a
new forest would grow above it that would get petrified,
and so on and so forth. There's two thousand vertical
feet of petrified forests, one on top of the other
(07:27):
in Gallatin in Montana. Isn't that nuts?
Speaker 2 (07:30):
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, then you, my friend,
have never seen petrified wood, because petrified wood is amazing looking.
It takes on colors because each mineral will end up,
(07:53):
you know, filling those pores in that vascular system and
turning that wood. So you have the like the beautiful
structure like when you cut a cross section of a tree,
and those beautiful rings in the shapes, the wavy lines
like that stuff remains, but all of a sudden, it's
green and it's red, and it looks amazing because you know,
(08:14):
depending on the mineral, it will give you a different
color in a different shade, and you polish that stuff
up and it looks like, you know, some kind of
a beautiful gemstone, when in fact it is fossilized tree.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
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 pyrite.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Good band name, by the way.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Native iron sure totally. Pyrite creates black shades. Another thing
that you very frequently see is you'll see a petrified
log and 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 sprinkled with fairy dust. This is actually just little
(09:01):
silica covered 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 quarts as much heavier than wood.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah, pretty amazing. Those forests that you mention are the
ones that are you know, well known for like having
tons and tons of like vertical structures. But you can
find petrified wood all over the world. Anywhere there's trees,
there's probably you know, going to be some example of
petrified wood that has been found there.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
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 like the earth,
the movement of the earth, the pressure from the dirt
above them, whatever can snap them. And when they snap
(09:51):
so cleanly, it looks like they were you know, sawed.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Oh wow.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Yeah, pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Petrified wood. Amazing mud honey, amazing.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
There you go. We still short stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts, my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, Chuck, Jerry,
Dave Spirit go hey.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Can I give the quickest music shout out?
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Making this yunger?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
I guess I know it's a shorty, but I just
quickly want to say I went to see mud Honey
last night.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
HM.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
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 twenty eight songs like
it was nineteen ninety five and threw their stuff down
(00:45):
and Mark Arm went to the mic and said, we
still mud Honey and they got out of there and
it was amazing. It blew me away. And my expectations
are already high.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
So but you can tell that they're aged because you
was like, this microphone's too expensive for me to drop here.
He really thought that through God, this guy's are killer
good right good good shout out Chuck.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
They petrified my ears? How about that for a segment.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
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 not.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
This is a good guess.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
So petrified wood. Whenever I think of that, I think
of like the petrified forests, and I always just thought
it was like really hard wood.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
I never knew the deal.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yeah, so wrong. And I should know this because we
did a really great episode on fossils. But what petrified
wood is? This just fossilized wood Rather than an old
crusty chylobite or something like that. It's an old crusty
tree that's now mineral not wood.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty remarkable. It's you know, 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. Yeah, but this stuff is, you know,
it's fossilized from the inside out and it's replaced by minerals,
(02:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
My friend I saw that it can happen according to
one study.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Well wait a minute, two days.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
They found between seven and thirty six years is the fastest. Wow,
seven years.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
It's like incredible.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
You might have a job as long as it takes
for this thing to be petrify and then you move
on somewhere else. And if you're like, the tree's already petrified,
you know.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Yeah, So here's the deal. Usually when a tree dies,
it rots, it decomposes, and it just decays, you know,
like we've talked about plenty of times before micro organisms
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
(03:06):
buried over by something that shields it from oxygen, whether
it be volcanic ash or mud or silt or something
like that or mud honey or haha, very nice, but
it gets buried under that such that cuts it away,
cuts off from oxygen. Oxygen is the big factor in
that natural rot to decay, and so if that's not
(03:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Right.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Yeah, Like the decomposition is going to happen one way
or another. It's just going to 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 day tree, right gets in
the pores, It gets in all the nooks and crannies
(04:05):
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 poores so completely,
even though there's the trees itself is not left any longer,
(04:28):
a mineral rock version of that tree is left behind.
That's a petrified tree.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah. And you know, we mentioned that it takes a
very very long time normally, but you said as little
as 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
(04:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
I say we take a break and come back and
talk a little more about petrified wood. How about that.
Let's do it, so, Chuck, I'm not sure if you
(05:34):
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
(05:58):
is pretty cool. But I feel to digress. I found
another one that I think is even cooler. It's in Montana,
which I think Yellowstone runs into Montana too, and it's
called Gallatin National Park, and it's a petrified forest like
the real deal. So in Yellowstone you got a bunch
of like petrified logs laying around, and what that is
(06:19):
is evidence of one way that that wood can become petrified.
They basically became covered by sediment and rivermuck after falling
into a river and going downstream and basically clogging up
the mouth of the river or whatever. Right a Gallatin,
it's a true petrified forest because the trees are still
(06:40):
upright and were 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
(07:03):
in ash every year, yeah, every several tens of thousands
or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, and
every time it did, that forest became petrified. And little
by little, after you know, one forest was petrified, a
new forest would grow above it that would get petrified,
and so on and so forth. There's two thousand vertical
feet of petrified forests, one on top of the other
(07:27):
in Gallatin in Montana. Isn't that nuts?
Speaker 2 (07:30):
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, then you, my friend,
have never seen petrified wood, because petrified wood is amazing looking.
It takes on colors because each mineral will end up,
(07:53):
you know, filling those pores in that vascular system and
turning that wood. So you have the like the beautiful
structure like when you cut a cross section of a tree,
and those beautiful rings in the shapes, the wavy lines
like that stuff remains, but all of a sudden, it's
green and it's red, and it looks amazing because you know,
(08:14):
depending on the mineral, it will give you a different
color in a different shade, and you polish that stuff
up and it looks like, you know, some kind of
a beautiful gemstone, when in fact it is fossilized tree.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
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 pyrite.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Good band name, by the way.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Native iron sure totally. Pyrite creates black shades. Another thing
that you very frequently see is you'll see a petrified
log and 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 sprinkled with fairy dust. This is actually just little
(09:01):
silica covered 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 quarts as much heavier than wood.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah, pretty amazing. Those forests that you mention are the
ones that are you know, well known for like having
tons and tons of like vertical structures. But you can
find petrified wood all over the world. Anywhere there's trees,
there's probably you know, going to be some example of
petrified wood that has been found there.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
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 like the earth,
the movement of the earth, the pressure from the dirt
above them, whatever can snap them. And when they snap
(09:51):
so cleanly, it looks like they were you know, sawed.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Oh wow.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Yeah, pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Petrified wood. Amazing mud honey, amazing.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
There you go. We still short stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts, my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
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