Petrification
Dr. Jesse Reimink: [00:00:00] Welcome to Planet the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
scared Watson as usual.
Chris Bolhuis: Watson's gotta relax. Jesse, I think you know,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: what the heck? You waking waking me up from my nap over there.
Chris Bolhuis: you need to clap more often, I think. Just clap randomly as you're walking around the
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, well the other day [00:00:30] he was, um, I was in a meeting, like a zoomo meeting, and he was he was laying under my chair and like I sort of wheel around or shift around. And so every time in the meeting I've look down, make sure I'm not rolling over his ear or something like that. 'cause he was just sprawled like right under my chair and I was like, man, I can't roll over his tail.
That would really piss him off.
Chris Bolhuis: that would not, not go well. Um, I just got back from work, and so the opposite side of Watson is my dog tubs. He's a black lab. He's 14 and he has [00:01:00] no idea. I'm home. I've trounced through the house. I've slammed the door. You know, I've been in and out a couple times and he has no idea.
he's deaf and, not a good guard dog anymore. He used to be really good at that kinda stuff and
Dr. Jesse Reimink: how, how's his sniffer these days? does he like pick up your scent and notice that you're home that way? Is that how he does
Chris Bolhuis: that's the only way. otherwise you, if I'll literally, I can walk up to him, I can kneel down. He's laying on his little dog bed, you know, we got, he's, he's well taken care of, so, and if I start
Dr. Jesse Reimink: it's a
lush, [00:01:30] lush, dog bed.
Chris Bolhuis: It is, and his tail will just start thumping like crazy, you know? And, but yeah, sounds, nothing. His sight's good is, is he can smell, and he still loves food, so his taste is all right. So he's pretty
Dr. Jesse Reimink: with you guys, I don't know, what was it? May or something like that. And the funniest thing, your dogs always have funny, like, uh, characteristics, but I think the funniest thing was that he, he was standing at the foot of the stairs going up to the upstairs where you and Jenny's bedroom is.[00:02:00]
And he was just barking. And I was like, what the heck does this dog want? And Jenny walks out from, she was like upstairs doing something. She walks out, she's like, oh, he needs to be invited upstairs. So she goes, come on tubs. And then he goes up. But he just will not go upstairs until he is invited.
Chris Bolhuis: he needs a personal invite wherever he goes now, and so, and. It is hilarious. Plus he, we need to use sign language because he can't, so we wave him. We're like, come on, come along with us. You know? And 'cause he can't hear it, you can say, come on, tubs. And he doesn't know what the heck is going on.
He's, [00:02:30] their lips are moving, but no sound is coming out. This is a very strange
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Weird humans. Weird humans. He thinks you guys have gotten weirder, which, uh, you probably have a little bit, but
Chris Bolhuis: he does. That's true. That's true. I'll, own that one.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Chris today, Petr, ation is kind of our think petrified wood is what everybody thinks about. Have you ever purchased? I know, you know, you and I don't like to buy our rocks.
We like to collect them. Have you ever purchased a pet piece of petrified Wood from anywhere?
Chris Bolhuis: I have not, I, I can't remember Jesse, the last [00:03:00] time that I bought a rock actually. I can actually, I can. My favorite mineral I think has gotta be malachite. I just love the color of it. It's this beautiful green, it's copper oxide and Actually one of my professors went to the Tucson Mineral Show and gave him a hundred bucks or something like that.
I'm like, get me something nice. And so he comes back with this big chunk of Malachi 'cause he knows I love it. So that's one of the only, and the last rock or mineral that I ever bought was that.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Wow. Well, I, I don't know. I [00:03:30] don't think I've ever collected petrified wood. Certainly haven't bought any of it, so I don't even know if I have any petrified wood in my collection, uh, at all, which is maybe a bit of a shame we should rectify that since we're doing an episode on the stuff
right
Chris Bolhuis: know, but it, it's kind of a sticky thing. right Uh, because we've talked about collecting like in national forests, which you can almost always do, but you, can't. Collect fossils in a petrified forest and this counts as that. And so [00:04:00] collecting is really, um, you know?
you really need to do your homework before you go about doing something.
'cause you don't wanna do something wrong.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: No, that's right. I mean, fossils I mean, for the most part, you can really only collect in. privately owned, places where you kind of pay to collect. Like you and I collected some fossils from, I forget which shale formation, what it was, but, where you kind of split up, is it Green River?
So you're splitting open little pieces of wafers of shale and looking for fossils. Inside. Places like that are where you can, legally collect fossils, but they're often kind of a pay to play sort of [00:04:30] place. But, Chris, the word petrified. I think it's a good time. There's all these words like Geology.
We have so many stupid names. And your mom, your mom, Joyce, has brought up, many times how an e via email. I don't know. You, you tend to ignore the emails from your mother, but I read them all the time. And, uh, she's brought up how Our pronunciation is like all over the place a little bit.
She often sides with you. When we get into pronunciation debates, like it's very irritating. Joyce is always on Chris's side no matter what. [00:05:00] But the reason I'm bringing this up is 'cause we have a lot of weird words. Yeah, I can tell. I mean, she's, you're, you're her son and you're her. You're the
Chris Bolhuis: No, that's not the reason?
No, it's not because, because I don't say things like methane and substance. I don't use the
So she sides with me because I'm on the right side. That's right. I'm correct.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I see. Well, uh, all that to say, like we, we have words that are weird, like Geology is full of words that are weird, whereas biology often has this, like Latin root to [00:05:30] words, like, especially in medicine or biology, words kind of make sense. Petrified or petr is one of them that makes sense.
there is a root to it, right? And so it kind of, it made the word makes sense a little bit.
Chris Bolhuis: That's right. I, I always go back to one of the first classes that anyone, well actually they're kind of changing this and that's a whole different discussion, but the class petrology is kind of going away. now, they're like combining mineralogy and petrology and calling it like rocks and minerals or something like that.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: that's what we have here.
Chris Bolhuis: Right, and you and I [00:06:00] though both went through this older kind of school where we took traditional mineralogy, and then the next part of that succession was probably petrology. And so petro the root word of that petro means rocks. And so petrified, you can think of it as petrified, if you will, if that helps.
But and then of course, um, it's called petrified wood, so it's rock and wood.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah,
Chris Bolhuis: So it was once alive.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: and it, it's like, people often confuse petro with, petroleum [00:06:30] is, is what people think of, but petroleum is named. Because of the rock, because petro means rock. So petroleum is named such because it comes from rocks. And so, petro, like you said is, is the base word rock. So petrified is to turn into a rock.
I think you were going there. Sorry for interrupting with the, the petroleum thing, but,
Chris Bolhuis: No, that's right. but Jesse, you, I wanna throw this back to you because you, I think we need to paint the picture of what is the difference between then petrified wood and a fossil.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Uh, it's [00:07:00] relatively simple. I mean, fossils can be a whole bunch of things. Fossils are, the broader category here in petr fixation or petrified objects are a subset of fossils. So they're a type of fossil. I mean, think of fossils. Fossils can be actually organic.
Pieces of organic matter. They can also be trace fossils. We have things called trace fossils, which are like worm burrows where the worm is not preserved, but their burrow is preserved, and so those are all fossils.
Chris Bolhuis: That's right. And those are some of my favorite. I do have a, a fairly [00:07:30] substantial amount of rock, sedimentary rock that has these trace fossils in it. And then these are from like filter feeders and burrowing organisms. And so, and they leave these really cool, traces behind on the surface of the rock.
So I'm. a, I'm a big fan of that.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, there. I mean, I'm.
Chris Bolhuis: note, you got me excited. Sorry.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So let's not go into those. I, I, I think I've said this before, trace fossils do not excite me very much, but they're not, uh, they don't do it for me. You know, they don't do it for me. but petr, ation and petrified stuff always looks really [00:08:00] cool. And so, the reason for talking about Petr Kitchen now is kind of twofold, Chris, like you are just out west and, looking at these beautiful petrified forests, which is a good opportunity to point to our Yellowstone National Park Geology course, which we now have on the Camp Geo, app as well, that you can download, you can purchase and, and you can get access to all of our stuff.
But we have basically a whole episode dedicated to these petrified forests in Yellowstone, which are just an amazing, amazing scientific story. Petrified objects are sort of a hot [00:08:30] topic in endocrinology as well. And so we're gonna kind of use this episode to kick off a endocrinology sort of series where we're gonna go through a bunch of different things related to endocrinology and, we'll end this conversation talking dating petrified fossils basically.
Um, so.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, that's true. That's a good point. And, and I want real quick, again, back talking about Yellowstone very quickly here we got to see some absolutely massive redwood trees preserved in Yellowstone. Some of them were still upright as [00:09:00] these like. You know, 16 foot high stumps and some of the trees were knocked over and it were these horizontal logs. but it was a really, really cool thing, Jesse, but man, was it a punishing hike? It was. It's been a long time since I've taken any students there and it was, they thought we were absolutely just brutally punishing
them. I mean, it's a, it was a hard heart.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: This is one that was, it wasn't super long, but it was very steep. Is [00:09:30] that, is that right? Very, uh, high, um,
Chris Bolhuis: It was really steep. And it funny because at the end of the trip the kids do skits and one tent group did a skit with us on Andrew and I, and they, they show us, they said, well, we're gonna talk about the peculiar relationship between Mr. Dewitt and Mr. Bull heis. And these two kids come skipping in, holding hands, and then these other kids are dragging behind 'em.
because. Andrew and I were just super excited to see [00:10:00] these trees, and for the most part, I think the kids were too, but it was it was a little bit tempered by the brutality of the hike. Um, but one kid did say to me, he said, Mr. Bois, this is perhaps the best experience of my entire life.
He was so excited about seeing these trees. It was just
that's just a very cool. thing.
So, Yeah,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: so, so Chris, why don't you give us a, a quick outline of what we're gonna cover, sort of bullet point, the, the topics we're gonna hit here as we work with through the episode. 'cause this has the potential to get a little bit confusing. I think [00:10:30] this, particular topic, everything in there, every piece is relatively simple, but in combined it could potentially, you know, get lost in the weeds a little bit.
Chris Bolhuis: so we're gonna begin by talking about the conditions geologically that.
Allow for fication to happen. In other words, the wood doesn't rot. Instead something else happens. And then we're gonna get into, you know, the geologic conditions where, this can actually occur. And we're gonna finally wrap up with, how does the science [00:11:00] work
with Petr?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: and we're gonna have to keep each other out of the weeds here. I think. So this is gonna be an exercise in me keeping you outta the weeds and you keeping me outta the weeds. So we agreed we can, we'll keep each other outta the weeds this episode.
'cause there's a tendency sometimes when we want to go into the weeds, we can kind of death spiral both of us into the weeds. And I
don't
Chris Bolhuis: true. that's
true. I know.
Probably not.
Probably not, but it, it's just a cool thing, right.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: okay Chris. So the conditions that are needed for fication. So pet ation happens [00:11:30] relatively quickly on a geologic timescale, like thousands to tens of thousands of years, but pretty long on biological timescale. So what conditions do we need for this to to happen?
Chris Bolhuis: Well, like you just said, we basically, we, we can't have the wood. Rot. And so what we need to have is we need to have, the wood usually, almost always needs to be buried. In this wet sediment that is saturated with certain minerals, loaded with dissolved minerals. And it's almost [00:12:00] always, we'll get into the detail later on, but it's almost always gonna be silica, which is a quartz rich, dissolved constituent to the water.
And the other really important thing is the. Burial needs to be anoxic it It needs to be very little oxygen present because that's all that these decomposers need. Give them some air and then they'll just eat the wood and it'll decompose and rot And petr. Ation can't happen then, so, it's gotta be wet, rich in minerals and [00:12:30] very low oxygen content.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So I think that the, a way to think about this is like, you need the stuff in this case wood, to be preserved for a long time and think about walking around the forest and you see, dead trees falling, or you're up in the mountains, you see dead trees falling down.
they can be old. Those could be really old. On human time skills, but it's rare you'd see a thousand year old, tree trunk laying there that hasn't decayed away, right? These things do decay over many, many years. So we need to kind of preserve those, as you said, lock them away in some [00:13:00] place where microbes can't get to them and they can't break down and they, the organic matter can't decompose.
And so, A couple of key areas where this can happen. Lowland areas in tropical climates, this is like the classic place where a lot of fossils are typically made. So you, you are basically forming a shale, so you have rivers that flood in, you have mud and sand burying things really rapidly, and there's enough organic matter around where there's no oxygen.
It just soaks up any of the free oxygen. So, [00:13:30] decomposition does not happen very much. This is a coal forming environment, an ancient coal forming environment like a peatland or a wetland, or a lowland. Another one,
which is really common,
Chris Bolhuis: That. Hold on real quick. Deltas floodplains, that's the kind of environment that you're describing there. so you take those kinds of geologic settings or that swampy coal forming environment, you know, and you put it? in a tropical climate and those are really, really good conditions for gentrification to [00:14:00] happen.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, exactly.
Chris Bolhuis: you know, way back in the past, so
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Exactly. and another one which we talk about for the, for the instance of Yellowstone, the, petrified trees that you were just talking about, petrified wood. You were talking about taking your students to, these are volcanic ash deposits in volcanic ash, especially these, these.
Big straddle volcanoes that we've talked about before. When ash and lahar deposits get washed downhill, they can knock down all the trees and then they can bury the trees, and that's again, a really reducing environment. This volcanic [00:14:30] ash is really reducing, and so that stuff can just sit there and, and does
not decompose quickly.
Chris Bolhuis: it is the perfect setting. and mentioned this word, and again, for review sake, lahar, lahar is like this volcanic mud flow. And so you have this, it has the ability to knock over trees as it floods out of the river valley destroys everything in its path and it buries it quickly.
So you have everything that you need. It seals it off from the air above, also because it's [00:15:00] volcanic related, it's loaded with silica, the water is, and so that's a very common setting where these kinds of things can happen In the
past.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: And I think Chris, that points to a really interesting, property here is that if you bury stuff in like asphalt or in soil or something like that, Think about where the oxygen will be coming from to do this decomposition. It's almost all coming from the atmosphere.
When that atmospheric oxygen has to get through a bunch of rock to make its way to this organic material, this tree down, buried [00:15:30] meters below the surface, a lot of oxidation reactions happen. A lot of that oxygen is consumed by things like rusting, you know, turning, all the iron into the rock, into like hematite or something.
Oxygen will be consumed before it reaches the tree down buried at depth. So as soon as you bury something, bury something quickly is a good way to lock it away and preserve it for future fication, which brings us
Chris Bolhuis: hold on. My young sage that is really well put. I I did not know what you were gonna say.
Uh, and [00:16:00] that is such a good point that's you did. But it's such a good point because one of the things that we love about petrified wood are all the colors, right. It, that are in the minerals. And most of those colors are result of iron or some other metal that oxidizes and.
Again, consuming the available oxygen and preventing the decomposers from going to town on it, so really,
really good point.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: and you get the segue award for this episode. 'cause nice segue into like, I think what we have to cover next, which is like, what is pet ation? Like, [00:16:30] what's happening? Okay, we've got this thing preserved. It's preserved, it's sitting down there, it's organic material. What's happening? Well, I think most people.
If you're interested in petr fixation or petrified wood, you've probably thought about this and you might've come to the, the conclusion here, it's turning it into a rock. So we have to get rock into that biological structure of, in this case, a tree. And there's a couple common categories of stuff really.
There's. Its quartz is the main one. So s i o two, varieties of sio O two, and then also pyrite. So pyrite does [00:17:00] this as well. So if we, we go back to our two settings, the sort of floodplain deposit where there's lots of organic material, river mouth in a tropical climate where lots of organic materials just piling up.
That's where you'll often get prioritization happening. And these volcanic ash deposits where trees are getting knocked down and buried. This is often where we get. The solidification or silica being added in. And so Chris, what are the, the types of minerals that can do this ification?
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, we're gonna stick to, [00:17:30] for the sake of staying outta the weeds, to just the Solidification for the most part. And so there are two kinds of common mineralization that you get. One is called CalEd, or
CalEd
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Do we need a pronunciation competition here with Joyce? Because CalEd or Caledon is Caledon
another. Valid
What? No,
Chris Bolhuis: do you?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: no, but I've also heard it called Cedi. Caledon.
Cedi. [00:18:00] Caledon.
How do you say
it?
Chris Bolhuis: I, I say Cal
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Cal Saidy. Okay. Ooh, the emphasis on the E there, huh? Okay. That's good. We'll, we'll see what Joyce thinks about that.
Who's right? Of course she's gonna come back
with, oh, Chris is right. My son is right. Cal Saidy.
Chris Bolhuis: Well, you know, we can simplify the whole thing And a lot of people that are into this a lot, they call, they just call it agonized wood, you know, and we did an episode a long time ago on how agates form agates are highly sought after 'cause they're beautiful. they [00:18:30] tend to happen in geodes and so on.
And. The agates are almost always made up of this micro crystalline flavor of quartz, which is called calendy. There's another beautiful variance on this, which is called opal or opal wood. and this is a non crystalline form of silica. And the difference is between this and Cal Saidy is it usually has water as a part of its chemical formula.
So that changes some of the properties of it, but it's absolutely, or at least it can be v [00:19:00] gorgeous
stuff.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I mean, O Opal is. Extremely beautiful stuff. And as you said before, the color variations in petrified wood, or in, in most petrified organic pieces all come from oxidized, manganese, oxidized iron elements like that, that get in there, in very trace amounts. I mean, you would not really detect these unless you're using our lab at state and like analyzing them with a laser system or something.
You can detect the concentrations, but they're really small amounts. They're not really. Building minerals in there. They're just incorporated into the crystal structure [00:19:30] as kind of impurities. And I think we often think of. Petr ation as petrified wood. And that's what we're kind of framing this conversation around.
but this petr ation process always occurs in pyrite and there's a, a big, um, industry of collecting these sort of prioritized ammonite fossils and prioritized fossils that are in black shales. If you think of a black, black shale bed, There's a lot of iron in there and, when these things decay, they kind of release sulfur and iron plus sulfur.
You can get pyrite and the pyrite can [00:20:00] kind of take over. Um, And petrify the, you know, the, the fossil creature that's buried in the shale. We usually don't get trees down there that are prioritized, but we get a lot of other sort of or marine organisms that are, that are then prioritized and will form these beautiful fossils that are basically, it's a hunk of pyrite in the shape of like an ammonite fossil or something.
They're really spectacular.
Chris Bolhuis: And,
and
for our
listeners, pie right is Fools gold. And so it's absolutely stunning. It's gorgeous stuff
because who doesn't like fools gold? [00:20:30] Right?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: that's just a, a sort of a note about another chemical reaction that can take place in the other setting that we, that we talked about. But I think can move into like, actually the mechanisms for this. How do we get this quartz or opal or pyrite into the wood or the ammonite or whatever's being fossilized, being petrified.
Chris Bolhuis: Right. There are two ways that this happens, and actually both of them are almost always at play within the process. First of all, there is replacement where the actual wood fibers and [00:21:00] the, the cellular structure of the wood is replaced by the minerals. And this is kind of a, an interesting thing. So as the wood kind of slowly decays, and we, I.
know that we said that decay has to be minimized and, and it is minimized, but it's still occurring.
Right? Some of the molecules that make up those cellular walls of the wood are actually replaced by silica, by this microcrystalline variety of, Quartz or this non Krystal and variety of opal, you know, [00:21:30] and, and so what this does then, this is really a cool thing. It keeps the template of the cellular structure of the wood intact.
and that's really cool because that means that we can look at this cellular structure, the way the, the cell walls are put together, the way they, interlock with each other and so on. We can identify the species of wood. And that's a, that's a very cool thing and, and I'm sure you have a lot to say about that.
We're not going to today because this is more like in your field of, you would come across research [00:22:00] articles and so on like
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, yeah, this, this sort of micro replacement of like c and h bonds with silica bonds. But anyways, that the replacement happens, it's, it's rare to not
find replacement having occurred.
Chris Bolhuis: That's right, and, And it is kind of cool too, Jesse, is that some of the wood can still be intact even after millions of years. so not all of the wood needs to be, or is even necessarily going to be replaced. but the other thing that happens is called permineralization.
And this is [00:22:30] basically just where, wood fibers and cellular structures of wood is very, very porous. so solidification, which is the most common type of criminalization, is when silica rich water precipitates, silica deposits, silica within the cell walls and also between them.
It's not replacing the wood, it's just like filling everything up.
All the spaces between get filled up with this micro microcrystalline, variety of quartz,
and that's called Permineralization.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: think, let me [00:23:00] interrupt you right there, Chris. I want to just visualize this for people. Think about how trees respire, like how do trees get water up to their leaves? They're sucking water up from down below and it's, you know, this force of evaporation is pulling water up through the trunk.
Well, a dead tree is very porous. There's water that can flow through this thing. And when you have, especially like a lava flow or an ash flow, that is really, really fine-grained. Rock that is very, very easy to dissolve and silica is really easy to dissolve. So rain water comes in, that water starts to [00:23:30] pick up.
Silica hits the tree trunk, and it's not gonna decompose it, but it's loaded with silica, and that silica will flow through the tree and then can be precipitated in there again because, go back to our episode on the, the Geology of uranium, where we talked about these redox gradients where it'll be oxidizing fluid, it'll hit another rock and it'll turn reducing right away and dump it out.
That's what's happening here. this oxidized water that can pick up silica, hits the tree, trunk, gets sucked up the tree trunk, and then it becomes reducing and dumps out that silica [00:24:00] right there. So it's all these sort of little fine scale changes in the, in the, um, chemistry of the water that are doing this process.
Chris Bolhuis: you think about like a paper towel and you take a corner of a paper towel and you dip it in water and you'll see water soak up into the paper towel, that's what dead trees do. And so if they're soaking up this silica rich water, Then it will solidify, it's gonna deposit that mineral in the pore spaces and between the cell walls and so on.
And that
process is called [00:24:30] per mineralization.
so
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I think Chris, let, let me, let's just summarize this again real quick and then I wanna make a little bit of a point about this petrified wood. So, I mean, we've talked about what. Pet ation requires, and it's sort of, you need this quick burial or it needs to be isolated from decay. We talked about what type of stuff replaces, what does the petrifying, what type of minerals.
And that's, cal saidy Opal can happen with pyrite as well. And then we talked about how does that happen? How does it become rocked? And we have these replacement and criminalization,[00:25:00] processes that do this.
And petrified wood, you know, we talked about how it's rare. It is pretty rare, but you can find it in many sedimentary layers. All over the Western United States. So much so that I didn't actually know this, and I know I've been to Petrified Forest National Park, but there's a, an entire house built out of.
Petrified wood is called the Agate house. It's been restored, but this was built thousands of years ago, entirely out of petrified wood, because if you're in that landscape, you have this big wood pieces, petrified wood pieces that are [00:25:30] really solid. Once you make that thing, it speaks to the durability of petrified wood once you make this thing.
Petrified, it's just courts, and courts is really, really durable when it's in that solid phase. So I thought this was kind of interesting and there were hundreds of these structures constructed by the Pueblos, a thousand years ago in, in this region. So it, it is a useful, um, past societies found these things useful and we find them very beautiful and, um, treasure petrified wood in many ways.
Chris Bolhuis: um, I did not know that either. That's a really [00:26:00] interesting, um, point. I wanna round out this episode, Jesse, by talking about kind of like how this whole thing started. we're gonna do a series on geo chronology and you're the expert in the room on endocrinology.
So the question is, can we use. The methods that maybe you employ in your lab to date the age of a petrified piece of wood
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. Uh, this is a great question and it's a really good intro into geo. Chronology, I think into our series, and we've [00:26:30] touched on a lot of these topics before. one way to think about this is to make a good geo chronometer or a a clock, a geological clock. You need something, a substance that takes up a radioactive element.
Uranium's radioactive potassium's, radioactive. You need something that takes up one of those elements. We've talked about quartz. quartz is really bad at taking up. Radioactive developments like it, it really only wants silicon oxygen. It doesn't really take up too
much else, you know? And so
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, because those, those [00:27:00] atoms are, they're probably too oddly shaped, right? They don't fit in the crystal structure. They're too big probably to fit in the crystal structure
lattice of, uh, quartz crystal.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Exactly. And so quartz is not a great chronometer there as far as from this radioactive decay chronometers. And so if we sort of broaden this out from. Petr ation. We can broaden the, the question to sort of fossilization and there, when I was a student, when I was a PhD student, there was a paper that came out, in, I think it was [00:27:30] 2011 or something like that, that that proposed that we could date dinosaur bones, the fossilization process of dinosaur bones, of forming.
Dinosaur bones. And the reason was very much similar to our Geology of uranium episode where uranium was flowing through. It was getting picked up, being oxidized in the six plus state, and then when it hit the bone, it got dumped out and turned into uranium four plus. So basically during fossilization, the bone that is now a fossil would have been enriched in uranium, then that starts the clock. That's kind of, you [00:28:00] know, tipping the sand dial on edge is starting the clock pushing a bunch of uranium into it. And then over time that has decayed. That, was not, I would say, widely accepted. I think it's still sort of debatable how well you can date, dinosaur bones just dating the bone material or the fossil bone material.
There have been recently in the last. Year two, some, uh, tests using appetite and appetite's like the mineral in our teeth, right? And so appetite can form during this. [00:28:30] Fossilization process. during this mineralization process, this replacement or permineralization process, you can get tiny little appetite grains.
That with the, the sort of micro sampling techniques. we can go in and date those individual appetites and appetite's a good one for uranium ledge endocrinology. So I would say there's hope, but it's not entirely clear that it, it's, really reliable at the moment, But it begs the question, Chris, how do we get the dates of the fossil forests in Yellowstone National Park? Like how do we know when these things were [00:29:00] fossilized or when these things were, were sort of destroyed?
Chris Bolhuis: I would assume then that we have to bracket it between like what's below it and what's above it, where we can date the actual rocks themselves, that are in place, and then you kind of get this, uh, is that right? Is
that, that's kind of how
Dr. Jesse Reimink: exactly, yep, that's exactly what we were looking, I mean, if you have a big asphalt, big lahar flow goes through that. Lahar is a rock that is formed in that moment, and it's pretty easy to date these asphalts. So we just extract some zircons from, we can get [00:29:30] ages of the rock that killed the trees.
And then the assumption is that the, the ification process happened. A few tens of thousands of years after that, like pretty soon
after that. So, so yeah, that's how we go about dating that. So there's kind of two processes, but it's a good intro. you know, I think starting out with, where the process doesn't work is perhaps a good intro into the broad topic
of endocrinology and where it does work in different places where it does work.
So,
Chris Bolhuis: so I remember reading the paper that you talked about with the dinosaurs, [00:30:00] 'cause
I think that was done by somebody out of University of
Alberta, wasn't it
Dr. Jesse Reimink: uh, in part, yeah,
done at the University of Alberta. Yeah,
Chris Bolhuis: so I didn't, I knew that it was, it was just happening and, and I didn't really know how it ended up. And so that's kind of where our discussion came from.
Then with, Hey, Jesse. Well, I was just out there. I'd looked at these awesome, gigantic redwoods. Redwoods would never grow in a climate like Yellowstone today. Um, and so this is, this speaks to a time that was ver, vastly different than it is now. How do we [00:30:30] know when we put a number on it and say these trees are 43 to 46 million years old.
How do we know that?
And, and that's kind of, that's where this whole thing came from,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I think it's a good, uh, a good start, a good start to a, uh, a series on endocrinology and also a good standalone episode. I mean, who doesn't like petrified wood? It is freaking
beautiful stuff, beautiful stuff, And I mean, it's just so cool to pick it up and think This used to be a tree.
Millions of
years ago, this was a tree. Now it's a rock. I'm holy in my hand. I mean, it, it totally
Chris Bolhuis: And it's A lot heavier. than the tree was. You know, the
[00:31:00] petrified wood is heavy stuff. Um, but that ought to make sense. That ought to make sense because the wood is so porous. We talked about that. And that porosity is. replaced by, no porosity
because it's filled in with quarts
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Absolutely. Absolutely. Hey, this was a fun episode. If you wanna follow all of our episodes, you can go to planet geo cast.com. That's our website there. You can subscribe, you can support us. We've gotten a bunch of support recently. We super love that, that helps us keep spreading the word about the geosciences and keep this thing going.
If you wanna learn [00:31:30] about Yellowstone and these beautiful petrified wood forests that we were just talking about, you can head over to geo.camp courses.com or the first link in your show notes. There you can, learn all about the Geology of Yellowstone National Park and the Geology as we teach it in our intro level classes.
You can also get all of their past episodes from Planet Geo there as well. And last thing, leave us a rating and a review on your podcast platform that really helps the algorithm
Chris Bolhuis: Cheers.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: peace. [00:32:00]
