Ah, how many millions of years does it take to petrify wood?
LOL no scientific questions allowed!
Depends how frequently Janet Reno, Hillary Clinton, or Helen Thomas had been in proximity.
Was it covered with lead based paint?
Apparently not much more than 4 hours according to all the ED commercials
> Ah, how many millions of years does it take to petrify wood?
Wood can be lithified pretty rapidly.
If I remember correctly, the logs blown into the mud from the explosion on Mt. St. Helens were petrified within a few years.
One season we were particularly annoyed by a delivery of firewood that was dry when we got it, but it was unusually heavy. It did not burn well, but rather smoldered like a cigar and left a sandy-textured ash.
When we called to complain to the seller about it, he said that the wood had been laying around in the mud for a few of months before he had stacked it to dry. Apparently, it already been partially petrified from sitting in the mud just a few months.
We had to buy more firewood, from another source, of course, because that stuff was just unusable. We just left it in a pile and used it for bordering the garden and for corduroy walkways.
Well, in a Texas creek bed, they found a fossilized foot, in a boot, made in the 1950's.
It's not actually wood, but minerals have taken the shape of the organic material that rots away. It can actually take a very short time or a long time to do this, depending on the circumstances.
Just checked, apparently wood can be petrified in “hundreds or thousands of years” Or 2 days in a lab.
I would suppose that depends on the process. Since Arafat is described here as a volcano, the process might be quite rapid. After all, they did find petrified people when they dug up Pompeii. That gives an upper bound on the least time needed to petrify organic remains of about 2000 years.