Petrified Forest Jan 9

 How wood gets petrified

Petrified wood is created when a living tree falls into a stream, it gets caught and gets buried under sand and mud . Through time it gets buried deeper and deeper under the mud. It gets cut of from oxygen and ceases rotting. Silica in the ground water infiltrates the wood and through a chemical reaction replaces the organic mater with quartz crystals and minerals. The log is petrified. Subsequent erosion of the surrounding rock re-exposes the petrified log.  Continued erosion undercuts the log causing it to crack into segments . This wood is thousands of years old.

This area was once semi arid grassland and forest, during the Triassic period. At that time it was approximately 10 degrees north of the equator, near present day Costa Rico. As the super continent Pangea broke apart it drifted north . Some 218 million years later, this area is at 35 degrees north latitude. The Colorado plateau lifted slowly over millions of years raising this park to almost one mile above sea level. That is why the park is arid today.

There is a cabin that has been reconstructed from Petrified wood in the park and we were in need of a good hike as we have been lacking exercise in the last week . It was much simpler than I expected but it was just to show what kind of buildings had been constructed in that time period.
The window was put in the reconstructed building so visitors could see inside

There were no doors in these buildings, only openings from the top. A ladder was used to climb up on the out side and another to come down into the building.

Based upon the archeological digs the house would have been of the design in the picture and built between between 1050 and 1300 . A thousand years ago.

Some pictures of the petrified wood and logs along our hike

over he thousands of years , after the logs have become petrified , and turned to stone rather than wood, the pressure from the all the layers of earth above them breaks them into pieces. Wind and water over the centuries has uncovered them again.

The colors are created by the different minerals that got absorbed into the wood.

Theses pieces are taken and cut into slices and polished to make beautiful table tops etc.

This log was over 100 feet long

A typical scene 

a close up shot from the picture above