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Hey.

And welcome to The Shortstuff. I'm Josh, Chuck, Jerry, Dave, Spirit, Gough.

Hey, can I give the quickest music shoutout?

Making this longer. Yes, I guess.

I know it's a shortie, but I just quickly want to say I went to see Mudhoney last night.

Sure.

And boy, oh, boy, if Mudhoney 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 threw 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 and my expectations were already high.

But you can tell that they're aged because he was like, This microphone is too expensive for me to drop here. He really thought that through.

God, these guys are killer.

All right. Good shout out, Chuck.

They petrified my ears. How about that.

For a segue? That's a good one because we're talking about petrified wood. That's a perfect segue. I don't know if you knew that or not.

It's a good guess.

Petrified wood, whenever I think of that, I think of the petrified forest. I always thought it was really hard wood.

I never knew the deal.

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

Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. It's what happens when the organic stuff within a tree, and not always a tree, but any woody material. But we like to think of trees when we talk about petrified things. Yeah. But this stuff is 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 that we've ever found. Seven years.

That's incredible.

You might have a job as long as it takes for this thing to be petrified, and then you move on somewhere else and the trees are already petrified. Yeah.

So here's the deal. Usually when a tree dies, it rots, it decomposes, and it just decays, like we've talked about plenty of times before microorganisms get in there, break all that stuff down, and it eventually just becomes part of the earth again. Right. 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 mud, honey.

Or ha-ha, very nice. But it gets buried under that such that it 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. 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 dead tree.

It.

Gets in the pores, it gets in all the nooks and crannies and the vascular stuff and all that. As that rot happens, as the tree itself actually decays, what remains is that hardened mineral, usually silica, which eventually, over time, forms quartz. Because it's filled up those pores so completely, even though the trees itself is not left any longer, a mineral rock version of that tree is left behind. That's a petrified tree.

Yeah. We mentioned that it takes a very, very long time normally, but you said as little as seven years. 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 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.

Hello, I'm Chelsea Paredi. Do you feel chronic existential dread but love talking about delicious snacks? Call me, my podcast is relaunching. Subscribe and treat yourself to sound effects like this and this. Have you ever been attacked by a bear? Yeah. Yes. And moments like this. I happen to.

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Chuck, I'm not sure if you remember or not, but we're talking petrified wood, and we just explained how it works. There are places in this world that just have the right conditions for petrified wood to have formed. 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 Yellowstone runs into Montana, too. It's called Gallatin National Park. It's a petrified forest like the real deal. In Yellowstone, you got a bunch of petrified logs laying around. What that 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 or whatever. At Gallatin, it's a true petrified forest because the trees are still upright and were petrified in place where they were growing. What's even nuttier than that is because the site was so ripe for creating petrified wood, it happened again and again and again.

What they found is there was an ancient volcano that just kept covering the area in ash every several- Is that the.

Sound.

It makes? Yeah. Every several tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, and every time it did, that forest became petrified. 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 forest, one on top of the other in Gallatin in Montana. Isn't that nuts?

That is unbelievable. 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 cool, but 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 filling those pores in that vascular system and turning that wood. So you have the beautiful structure, like when you cut a cross-section of a tree, and those beautiful rings and the shapes, the wavy lines, 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 a beautiful gemstone, when 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. I mean, it looks like a log. The bark is very clear. It just looks like a log that fell over. But on the outside, it's a 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. Anywhere there's trees, there's probably going to be some example of petrified wood that has been found there.

Yeah. 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 can snap. When they snap, they snap so cleanly, it looks like they were sawed.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, pretty cool.

Petrified wood, amazing. Mud, amazing.

There you go. We still short stuff.

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