Re: Want to petrify wood without waiting a few million years?

>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."

Another thing that seems to come out of this part of the
blurb is that this would probably be difficult to do for
a large tree trunk.

>
>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.

I was also wondering about the composition. But as you
pointed out in your post below, it is not how fast something
fossilizes, it's just that _IF_ it becomes fossilized, there
is a greater chance that we might be able to discover it.

In fact, now that I think of it, rapid fossilization would
be better for radiometric dating. If the fossilization
process must take millions of years, then it increases the
margin of error.

>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>)

By the way, I don't think I ever asked, was any of that
60 Myr old "unpertrified" wood preserved (or preservable)?
That seems like such an interesting and unexpected find.
It is a case in point that things that don't fossilize
don't end up on display.

I think it didn't quite sink in completely before, but I
now see that the argument about the fossilization rate
is really just a strawman.

by Grace alone we proceed,
Wayne
Received on Fri Jan 28 10:36:44 2005