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SPEAKER_04: Hey and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, Chuck, Jerry, Dave, Spirit, go.
SPEAKER_03: Hey, can I give the quickest music shout out? You're making this longer. I guess. I know it's a shorty, but I just quickly want to say, I went to see Mudhoney last night.
SPEAKER_04: Mm-hmm, sure.
SPEAKER_03: 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 Mudhoney, and they got out of there. It was amazing. It blew me away, and my expectations are already high.
SPEAKER_04: But you can tell that they're aged because he was like, this microphone's too expensive for me to drop here. It was so great. He really thought that through. God, this guy's a killer.
SPEAKER_03: Good shout out, Chuck.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_04: I don't know if you knew that or not. That's a good guess. So petrified wood, whenever I think of that, I think of like the petrified forest, and I always just thought it was like really hard wood. I never knew the deal. Wrong. So wrong, and 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.
SPEAKER_03: 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. Yeah. 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 permineralization. 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_04: 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.
SPEAKER_04: 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 tree's already petrified, you know?
SPEAKER_03: 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, 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-ha. Very nice. But it gets buried under that such that it cuts it away, cuts 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.
SPEAKER_04: 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 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, right? Mm-hmm. 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 a petrified tree.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_03: Either the tree is buried very, very fast instead of more slowly by this stuff and is 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.
SPEAKER_04: Right. I say we take a break and come back and talk a little more about petrified wood. How about that?
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SPEAKER_02: Hi, I'm Dr. John White, WebMD's chief medical officer and host of the Health Discovered podcast, where we bring you fascinating stories and unique perspectives like our recent episode where we break down the myths. To uncover the facts of type one diabetes.
SPEAKER_01: A lot of people, very well meaning people who cared about me just thought that it was caused by diet or can be cured by diet and exercise, especially right after I was diagnosed. People saying what what was it that you ate or are you going to have to change your diet to get rid of this? There's still a lot of, you know, people see me pick up some kind of dessert and they're like, oh, should you really be eating that or thinking, you know, if they give sugar free things to people, that's helpful.
SPEAKER_02: Listen to Health Discovered on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_04: So, Chuck, I'm not sure if you remember or not, but we're talking petrified wood and we just explained how it works. OK, 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 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, is evidence of one way that 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, right? At Gallatin, it's a true petrified forest because the trees are still 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 in ash 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 forest, one on top of the other in Gallatin in Montana. Isn't that nuts?
SPEAKER_03: 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 like the beautiful structure, like when you cut a cross-section of a tree and those beautiful rings and the shapes and 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, 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, you know, some kind of a beautiful gemstone when in fact it is fossilized tree.
SPEAKER_04: 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. Good band name, by the way. 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 a sprinkle of the 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.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, pretty amazing. Those forests that you mentioned 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_04: 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 or whatever can snap them. And when they snap, they snap so cleanly, it looks like they were, you know, solid. Oh, wow. Yeah, pretty cool.
SPEAKER_03: Petrified wood, amazing. Mud honey, amazing.
SPEAKER_04: There you go. We still short stuff.
