Want to petrify wood without waiting a few million years?

Fellow geologists (and other assorted odd science types <grin>), you might
want to check out the following press release.

--------------------------
<http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-01/dnnl-wtp012405.php>
Want to petrify wood without waiting a few million years? Try this

Excerpts from press release. ...

"Pacific Northwest National Laboratory scientists can mineralize wood in
record time."

"Yongsoon Shin and colleagues at the Department of Energy lab have
converted wood to mineral, achieving in days what it takes nature millions
of years to do in such places as the Gingko Petrified Forest, an hour up
the Columbia River. There, trees likely felled in a cataclysmic eruption
and, buried without oxygen beneath lava, leached out their woody compounds
and sponged up the soil's minerals over the eons."

"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."
--------------------------

I imagine that we will be hearing about this one soon from some of the
Young Earth apologists. However, the return answer should be obvious
from the few press quotes above.

1. The acid bath treatment and cooking in an argon-filled furnace doesn't
resemble any geologic processes that I can think of.
2. The artificial petrified wood is made of silicon carbide (SiC - rarely
found naturally on earth and then usually in small flakes associated with
iron meteorites) instead of the various forms of silicon dioxide (SiO2)
that commonly petrify wood.
3. The rate of petrification (fossilization) has nothing to do with the
age of the Earth. (See previous ASA list discussion on fossilization
rates at <http://www.calvin.edu/archive/asa/200001/0216.html>)

Steve
[Opinions expressed herein are my own. Don't blame my employer!]
_____________
 Steven M. Smith, Geologist, U.S. Geological Survey
 Box 25046, M.S. 973, DFC, Denver, CO 80225
 Office: (303)236-1192, Fax: (303)236-3200
 Email: smsmith@usgs.gov
 -USGS Nat'l Geochem. Database NURE HSSR Web Site-
  http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1997/ofr-97-0492/
Received on Thu Jan 27 19:33:05 2005