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Short Stuff: Petrified Wood · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, Chuck, Jerry,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Dave Spirit go hey.
• 0:10
  Speaker 2: Can I give the quickest music shout out?
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Making this yunger?
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: I guess I know it's a shorty, but I just
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: quickly want to say I went to see mud Honey
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: last night.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: HM.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: Sure, And boy, oh boy, if mud Honey comes through
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: your town on this tour and you have any love
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: for that band from the old days, go go go. Okay,
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: these guys just blistered you for twenty eight songs like
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: it was nineteen ninety five and threw their stuff down
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: and Mark Arm went to the mic and said, we
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: still mud Honey and they got out of there and
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: it was amazing. It blew me away. And my expectations
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: are already high.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: So but you can tell that they're aged because you
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: was like, this microphone's too expensive for me to drop here.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: He really thought that through God, this guy's are killer
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: good right good good shout out Chuck.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: They petrified my ears? How about that for a segment.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: Oh that's a good one because we're talking about petrified wood,
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: so that's like a perfect segue. I don't know if
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: you knew that or not.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: This is a good guess.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: So petrified wood. Whenever I think of that, I think
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: of like the petrified forests, and I always just thought
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: it was like really hard wood.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: I never knew the deal.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so wrong. And I should know this because we
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: did a really great episode on fossils. But what petrified
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: wood is? This just fossilized wood Rather than an old
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: crusty chylobite or something like that. It's an old crusty
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: tree that's now mineral not wood.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's pretty remarkable. It's you know, it's what
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: happens when the organic stuff within a tree, and not
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: always a tree, but any kind of like woody material.
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: But we like to think of trees when we talk
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: about petrified things. Yeah, but this stuff is, you know,
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: it's fossilized from the inside out and it's replaced by minerals,
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: a lot of times very heavy in silica. And that
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: process is called per mineralization, and it usually takes millions
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: of years, but as we'll see in a second, sometimes
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: it can happen in decades or hundreds of years given
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: the right conditions.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: My friend I saw that it can happen according to
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: one study.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: Well wait a minute, two days.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: They found between seven and thirty six years is the fastest. Wow,
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: seven years.
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: It's like incredible.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: You might have a job as long as it takes
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: for this thing to be petrify and then you move
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: on somewhere else. And if you're like, the tree's already petrified,
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: you know.
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, So here's the deal. Usually when a tree dies,
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: it rots, it decomposes, and it just decays, you know,
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: like we've talked about plenty of times before micro organisms
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: get in there, break all that stuff down, and it
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: eventually just becomes part of the earth again. Sometimes, though,
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: a tree might fall and very very quickly it is
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: buried over by something that shields it from oxygen, whether
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: it be volcanic ash or mud or silt or something
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: like that or mud honey or haha, very nice, but
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: it gets buried under that such that cuts it away,
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: cuts off from oxygen. Oxygen is the big factor in
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: that natural rot to decay, and so if that's not
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: around all of a sudden, it's decomposing really really slowly,
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: and so slowly that those minerals that it's buried in
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: can seep in.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and those minerals are really important because if you
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: don't have minerals, what you end up with is coal
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: and then eventually diamonds.
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Like the decomposition is going to happen one way
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: or another. It's just going to take much longer without
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: oxygen if you have minerals. However, though, those minerals, that
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: mineral rich like mud or water, whatever that's present, can
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: start to seep into that day tree, right gets in
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: the pores, It gets in all the nooks and crannies
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: and the vascular stuff and all that. And as that
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: rot happens, as the tree itself actually decays, what remains
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: is that hardened mineral, usually silica, which eventually over time
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: forms quartz. And because it's filled up those poores so completely,
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: even though there's the trees itself is not left any longer,
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: a mineral rock version of that tree is left behind.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: That's a petrified tree.
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And you know, we mentioned that it takes a
• 4:39
  Speaker 2: very very long time normally, but you said as little
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: as seven years. And that is either one or two
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: or both things happen. Either the tree everything is basically
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: sped up. Either the tree is buried very very fast
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: instead of more slowly by this stuff, and it's cut
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: off from that oxygen much much quicker, or if there's
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: just tons and tons and tons of the mineral instead
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: of just sort of a regular amount.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: I say we take a break and come back and
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: talk a little more about petrified wood. How about that.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: Let's do it, so, Chuck, I'm not sure if you
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: remember or not, but we're talking petrified wood and we
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: just explained how it works. Okay. So there are places
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: in this world that just have the right conditions for
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: petrified wood to have formed, and there's a bunch of
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: them in the United States. Most famously, there's a very
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: large National Park Fossil Forest petrified forest in Yellowstone, which
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: is pretty cool. But I feel to digress. I found
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: another one that I think is even cooler. It's in Montana,
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: which I think Yellowstone runs into Montana too, and it's
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: called Gallatin National Park, and it's a petrified forest like
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: the real deal. So in Yellowstone you got a bunch
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: of like petrified logs laying around, and what that is
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: is evidence of one way that that wood can become petrified.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: They basically became covered by sediment and rivermuck after falling
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: into a river and going downstream and basically clogging up
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: the mouth of the river or whatever. Right a Gallatin,
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: it's a true petrified forest because the trees are still
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: upright and were petrified in place where they were growing.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: And what's even nuttier than that is because the site
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: was so ripe for creating petrified wood, it happened again
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: and again and again. So what they found is there
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: was an ancient volcano that just kept covering the area
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: in ash every year, yeah, every several tens of thousands
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, and
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: every time it did, that forest became petrified. And little
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: by little, after you know, one forest was petrified, a
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: new forest would grow above it that would get petrified,
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: and so on and so forth. There's two thousand vertical
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: feet of petrified forests, one on top of the other
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: in Gallatin in Montana. Isn't that nuts?
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: That is unbelievable. You can't there are laws. You can't
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: just take that stuff out and take it home because
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: it looks awesome. And if you're sitting there thinking like,
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: all right, this is kind of cool, but like kind
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: of what's the big deal, guys, Well, then you, my friend,
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: have never seen petrified wood, because petrified wood is amazing looking.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: It takes on colors because each mineral will end up,
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: you know, filling those pores in that vascular system and
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: turning that wood. So you have the like the beautiful
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: structure like when you cut a cross section of a tree,
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: and those beautiful rings in the shapes, the wavy lines
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: like that stuff remains, but all of a sudden, it's
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: green and it's red, and it looks amazing because you know,
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: depending on the mineral, it will give you a different
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: color in a different shade, and you polish that stuff
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: up and it looks like, you know, some kind of
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: a beautiful gemstone, when in fact it is fossilized tree.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty amazing. So you've got things like I
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: think hematite creates pink or red tints. Native iron creates
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: the greenish color pyrite.
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: Good band name, by the way.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: Native iron sure totally. Pyrite creates black shades. Another thing
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: that you very frequently see is you'll see a petrified
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: log and it, I mean, it looks like a log.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: The bark is all like very clear. It just looks
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: like a log that fell over. But on the outside
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: it's sprinkled with fairy dust. This is actually just little
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: silica covered like dustings of silica. And again, if you
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: picked up that log, you'd be like, this is a
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: really heavy log because it's not wood any longer. It's
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: quartz and quarts as much heavier than wood.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty amazing. Those forests that you mention are the
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: ones that are you know, well known for like having
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: tons and tons of like vertical structures. But you can
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: find petrified wood all over the world. Anywhere there's trees,
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: there's probably you know, going to be some example of
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: petrified wood that has been found there.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and one other thing. A lot of times it
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: looks like somebody came along and chopped up the petrified
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: wood into logs. That actually happens because they're so brittle.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: Once they become fossilized, any pressure from like the earth,
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: the movement of the earth, the pressure from the dirt
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: above them, whatever can snap them. And when they snap
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: so cleanly, it looks like they were you know, sawed.
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: Oh wow.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, pretty cool.
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: Petrified wood. Amazing mud honey, amazing.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: There you go. We still short stuff.
• 10:06
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• 10:09
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