[poindexters brother]

..Does wood petrify in 6,000 years? I think it takes a LOT longer than that...

I used to say the exact same thing because that was the mantra in science class. But then I started asking if there was any experimental or emperical evidence that verified these statements. To my surprise, I have yet to find any. All sources I have found seem to take this "long time to fossilize" as a given, with no need to verify.

if you find any verification of this oft-repeated "fact" I would love to see it.

[Star Traveler]

You were saying ...

if you find any verification of this oft-repeated "fact" I would love to see it.

There's evidence to the contrary ... namely being able to petrify wood in just a few days (there may even be quicker methods, as I seem to remember a day or less..., too...).

Petrified Wood in Days
January 25, 2005

Petrified wood is a type of fossil, in which the tissues of a dead plant are replaced with minerals (most often a silicate, like quartz). The petrifaction process occurs underground, when wood or woody materials suddenly become buried under sediment. Mineral-rich water flowing through the sediment deposits minerals in the plant's cells and as the plant's lignin and cellulose decays away, a stone cast is left in its place.

Shin's petrified wood journey began in a less dramatic fashion, a few minutes away at Lowe's, Shin's group reports in the current issue of the journal Advanced Materials, in the do-it-yourselfer chain's lumberyard,. There they picked up their raw material: pine and poplar boards. Back at PNNL, they gave a 1 centimeter cube of wood a two-day acid bath, soaked it in a silica solution for two more (for best results, repeat this step up to three times), air-dried it, popped it into an argon-filled furnace gradually cranked up to 1,400 degrees centigrade to cook for two hours, then let cool in argon to room temperature. Presto. Instant petrified wood, the silica taking up permanent residence with the carbon left in the cellulose to form a new silicon carbide, or SiC, ceramic. The material "replicates exactly the wood architecture," according to Shin.

[Star Traveler]

Here's a Wikipedia article on the subject ...

Petrified wood

Petrified wood (from the Greek root "petro" meaning "rock" or "stone", literally "wood turned into stone") is a type of fossil: it consists of fossil wood where all the organic materials have been replaced with minerals (most often a silicate, such as quartz), while retaining the original structure of the wood. The petrifaction process occurs underground, when wood becomes buried under sediment and is initially preserved due to a lack of oxygen. Mineral-rich water flowing through the sediment deposits minerals in the plant's cells and as the plant's lignin and cellulose decay away, a stone mould forms in its place.

In general, wood takes less than 100 years to petrify. The organic matter needs to become petrified before it decomposes completely. A forest where the wood has petrified becomes known as a petrified forest.

[ ... ]

Artificial petrified wood

Artificial petrified wood has been produced in a Washington laboratory. In the process small cubes of pine were soaked in an acid bath for two days, then in a silica solution for another two. The product was then cooked at 1400 °C in an argon atmosphere for two hours. The result was silicon carbide ceramic which preserved the intricate cell structure of the wood. Soaking in a tungsten solution produced a tungsten carbide petrified wood.

[Star Traveler]

How Long Does It Take For Wood To Petrify?

by John D. Morris, Ph.D.

Folklore has it, as reinforced in classrooms and national parks, that petrified wood takes "millions and millions" of years to form. I've listened as many people have protested the Biblical doctrine of the young earth. "It takes too long to petrify wood. The earth must be old."

Imagine their surprise when they realize that wood can petrify quickly, and that no informed geologist would say it takes an excessively long time, certainly less time than it takes for wood to decay in a given environment.

Wood can be petrified by two basic processes, both of which usually involve burial in volcanic ash. This ash decomposes in the presence of water, enriching the groundwater with silica.

In the first type of petrification, the wood decays in a hot, silica-rich environment. As each molecule of wood decomposes and is carried away, it is replaced by a molecule of silica. Eventually the replacement is complete, with the mineral impurities in the silica being responsible for an array of beautiful colors in the final product. This type of petrified wood can be polished, and often becomes an object of incredible beauty. Once silicification is complete, there is no organic material remaining, but since on occasion the light and dark portions of the tree's growth rings may decay at different rates, hints of the tree rings may be preserved if the minerals present change over time. Many of the petrified trees found in the Petrified "Forest" of Arizona are of this type.

The other type of petrification involves the total infiltration of the porous wood by silica-rich water. The silica (or in a few cases calcite, or a combination of both) plugs up the pores, preventing complete decay. This allows individual cells to be remarkably well preserved, and in many cases the tree ring pattern can easily be seen. The petrified trees in Yellowstone Park are of this type, with tree rings readily visible.

As is now well known, wood can petrify rapidly. Several laboratory experiments have devised ways in which this can be done, mirroring natural settings. (See Sigleo, 1978 "Organic Geochemistry of Silicified Wood," Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, vol. 42, pp. 1397-1405, and Leo and Barghoorn, 1976, "Silicification of Wood," Botanical Museum Leaflets, vol. 25, no. 1, Harvard University, 47 pp.)

Wood can also be petrified in field settings. During one field experiment, researchers dangled a block of wood down inside an alkaline spring in Yellowstone Park to see what effect this hot, silica-rich environment would have. In just one year, substantial petrification had occurred. I recently read an advertisement in a magazine for real "hardwood floors." The company was petrifying wood commercially. The point is, it does not take long ages to petrify wood, it just takes the right conditions.

These conditions, with abundant hot waters (i.e., "fountains of the great deep"—Genesis 7:11) and rampant volcanism, would be met during the flood of Noah's day and the centuries following.

*Dr. John Morris is the President of ICR.

[Star Traveler]

Rapid Petrification of Wood: An Unexpected Confirmation of Creationist Research

by Andrew A. Snelling, Ph.D.

It is extremely unusual for creationist research to be favorably reported and referenced in a technical scientific paper by academic geologists published in a major, secular, geological journal. However, not only has this just happened, but the same paper reported experimental research that confirms the conclusions of the creationist research published in a young-earth creationist journal!

The July 2004 issue of Sedimentary Geology included a paper by five Japanese scientists reporting their experiments on the rapid petrification of wood as an indication that silicified wood (fossilized by impregnation with silica) found in ancient strata must likewise have been rapidly petrified.¹ After noting that "several researchers believe that several millions of years are necessary for the complete formation of silicified wood,"² these authors state:

Snelling (1995) reviewed previous laboratory experiments, silica deposition of wood at Yellowstone National Park and various reports of natural petrification, and concluded that wood can be rapidly petrified by silicification under the right chemical conditions.

Then the Snelling (1995) Creation magazine article³ was listed in the references. In that article it was further concluded that:

the timeframe for the formation of the petrified wood within the geological record is totally compatible with the biblical time-scale of a recent creation and a subsequent devastating global Flood.

The Tateyama Hot Spring

The experimental research conducted by these five Japanese scientists was located at the Tateyama Hot Spring in the Toyama Prefecture of central Japan (figure 1). A hot spring lake 30 meters wide occupies one of several explosion craters of the Tateyama Volcano, which currently is relatively quiet, except for the spouting of hot water. The lake's average water temperature is approximately 70°C. The spring water spouting from the lake bed is highly acidic (pH 3) and has a high silica content. This has resulted in the precipitation of opal around the lake's shoreline. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) examination of this opal reveals that it consists of an irregular arrangement of silica spheres of different sizes.

Figure 1. Map showing the location of the Tateyama Hot Spring in central Japan.

The hot spring water overflows the lake as a 30 meter high waterfall. Abundant fragments of naturally fallen wood from nearby trees have adhered to the rocky wall of the waterfall, becoming impregnated with silica and hardened (somewhat petrified). This silicification obviously has resulted from the precipitation of silica spheres onto the cell walls in split surfaces of the fallen wood. Akahane and his fellow Japanese scientists observed that the textures of these wood tissues are the same as those in naturally silicified (petrified) wood found associated with volcanic strata in the geologic record, such as the Miocene sedimentary and volcanic ash strata of the nearby Noto Peninsula. They thus concluded that these naturally silicified wood fragments in the geologic record would seem to have been petrified by the same process under the same conditions as the wood fragments in the hot spring water.

Experimental Studies

To confirm the silicification process involved and to evaluate the silicification rate, ex-periments were undertaken. Ten pieces of fresh alder wood (Alnus pendula Matsumura), indigenous to the area, were tethered with stainless steel wire and placed into the hot spring water stream on August 28, 1990. Specimens were removed after one year (August 27, 1991), after two years (July 21, 1992), after four years (August 25, 1994), after five years (September 2, 1995), and after seven years (October 3, 1997). The hot spring water at the experimental site maintained a temperature of 50-52°C and a pH of 2.95-3.0 throughout the whole experimental period.

Both these experimental wood specimens and the silicified naturally fallen wood fragments were then chemically analyzed to determine how much silicification had occurred in them. Furthermore, to confirm the nature of any silica impregnation of the inner part of the wood tissue, the distribution of the silica in the wood tissue of the specimens submerged in the hot spring water for seven years and some of the naturally fallen and silicified wood fragments, was studied by SEM mapping.

Results and Discussion

The amount of silicification in the experimental wood specimens, measured as the silica content of the ash after the organic matter had been removed by heating the wood in an electric furnace, increased from 0.7% to 38.1% as the submerged time period increased from 1 to 7 years. Silicification during the first 1-2 years was found to be negligible (0.7-2.9%), but then increased markedly after 4-5 years to 10.7%-26.8%, and finally to 38.1% in the specimens submerged for 7 years in the hot spring water (figure 2).

By contrast, four specimens of the silicified naturally fallen wood fragments had silica compositions varying from 9.7% to 39.2% of the total weight of the wood. From 14C measurements it was determined that three of these four specimens must have fallen into the lake overflow stream after 1955. Thus the silicification rate of the naturally fallen wood pieces in the hot spring water was 9.7% to 39.2% in a period of less than 36 years (between 1955 and 1991). This silicification rate would appear to be much slower than that of the experimental wood specimens, perhaps due to their likely intermittent immersion in the hot spring water, compared with the constant total immersion of the wood pieces in the experiment.

A comparison of SEM photographs of the silicified naturally fallen wood and experimentally silicified wood revealed that silicification had occurred by deposition of silica spheres (2-3 µm diameter) onto the surfaces of the wood tissue (figure 3). This is consistent with the hot spring water depositing opal, made up of these same tiny silica spheres, on the lake bed and shores. Within wood tissue are vessels and intervessel pits that are passageways along which water passes. Thus Akahane and his colleagues concluded that the hot spring water containing silica spheres passed into the wood through the vessels and intervessel pits and deposited the silica spheres onto the individual cell walls, finally occupying the inside of the wood, including the vessels, cells, and fibers. Furthermore, in the Miocene petrified wood, not only were the same silica spheres found similarly deposited onto cell and vessel walls and in fibers and cells, but aggregations of silica spheres had replicated the structure of the vessel walls.

Figure 2. Graph showing the progress in the silicification
of the wood specimens with the increasing experimental period of
their submersion in the hot spring water.

Figure 3. Silica distribution and silica spheres in the wood experimentally
si-licified by submersion in the hot spring water for 7 years. Left: SEM
back-scattered electron image. Right: X-ray scan of the same wood
cross-section showing the distribution of silicon (SiKa). V=vessel, Si=silica.
(Photomicro-graphs by Hisatada Akahane and others, 2004.)

Conclusions

Akahane and his fellow Japanese scientists concluded that silicified (petrified) wood had been formed naturally under various conditions by deposition of tiny silica spheres (opal) within it. Although there had been a different rate of silicification within each piece of wood studied, at 7 to less than 36 years the silicification of the wood had been very rapid, compared with claims of several millions of years. They also concluded that petrified wood in ancient volcanic ash beds and sedimentary strata in volcanic regions could have thus been silicified by hot flowing ground water with high silica content in "a fairly short period of time, in the order of several tens to hundreds of years" by the same mechanism.

These experimental findings validate, and vindicate, the evidence documented by Snelling (1995) in Creation magazine "that under the right chemical conditions wood can be rapidly petrified by silicification," and "thus the timeframe for the formation of petrified wood within the geological record is totally compatible with the biblical time-scale of a recent creation and a subsequent devastating global Flood." Furthermore, because the silica in the rapidly petrified wood in these experiments is in the form of opal, this also confirms creationist documentation of other experiments that demonstrate opals form rapidly within months.⁴

References

1. Akahane, H., T. Furuno, H. Miyajima, T. Yoshikawa, and S. Yamamoto, 2004, Rapid wood silicification in hot spring water: An explanation of silicification of wood during the Earth's history, Sedimentary Geology, vol. 169, pp. 219-228.
2. Siever, R., 1972, Silicon, in, K. Wedepohl, ed., Handbook of Geochemistry, New York, Springer-Verlag, vol. II/3, pp. 241-265.
3. Snelling, A.A., 1995, "Instant" petrified wood, Creation, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 38-40.
4. Snelling, A.A., 1994, Creating opals: opals in months—not millions of years! Creation, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 14-17.

* Andrew A. Snelling, Ph.D. geology, is an Associate Professor in the Geology Department at the ICR Graduate School.