Mineral Mondays #63 Blue Forest Petrified Wood

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Mineral Mondays #63 Blue Forest Petrified Wood

While out at one of the mineral show a few weekends ago I was able to pick up one of my favorite petrified wood varieties, Blue Forest.

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Petrified wood is created when a tree or branch is downed and then protected from rot by various means, sap, algae, etc. The wood then must be protected further by a layer of ash or a sediment high in silica. Over millennia water will percolate through the layers surrounding the tree or branch and transport the silica into wood the replacing the cells with either opal, calcedony(agate) or quartz.

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The Blue Forest petrified wood comes from a 50,000,000 year old ancient forest in South Western, Wyoming. It's unique in that the color of the chalcedony produces blue layers around a black to shades of brown core, hence the name Blue Forest. The blue color is said to come from traces of titanium, manganese, copper and iron. Some specimens, like the piece shown in this post, also contain calcite(yellow) and will fluoresce under UV light.

The Blue Forest was a forest of sycamore trees that sat on the banks of a large lake called Lake Gosiute. The lake was surrounded by mountains on all sides so it would grow and shrink depending on annual rainfall. During the higher lake levels the waters would stretch into the forest. Branches and trees would fall into the water, be covered in algae and the process of petrification would begin. The algae protected the trees from decaying until sediment or ash covered them. This happened during a 5,000,000 year period. It's hard to even fathom that kind of time frame when we only live for 100 years and our oldest trees are only just over 4,000 years old.

The piece I bought was about 5 inches long.

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The dealer had quite a few pieces, but the pattern on this piece was the most attractive. I was able to cut it into 5 slabs, each one slightly different than the other as the agate, wood grain and calcite formed different patterns.

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(shown dry, unpolished)

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(shown wet, lighter streak is dry.)

The wood grain is really attractive on this piece and it is black on some slices. Now I am kinda wishing I had cut myself a few slices to polish and use for something....

Because of it's beauty and semi-rarity a slab of this size, 2.5inces round, will fetch between $25 - $35. I do have an end cut on my etsy shop if you are interested, but keep in mind shipping overseas is not free. https://www.etsy.com/Rt395Minerals/listing/1146012147/25-blue-forest-petrified-wood-end-cut?utm_source=Copy&utm_medium=ListingManager&utm_campaign=Share&utm_term=so.lmsm&share_time=1640656109154

Here is a nice, short video of a gentleman digging up and cleaning some logs & limbs in the Blue Forest.

My goal is to get up to the Blue Forest next year and make a video of the dig process just like Dan did in his video above, and of course find some killer specimens. I'd really like to make a table with some Blue Forest inlays for my home. It would look great inlayed with some walnut. Maybe a cutting board?

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Whoa, I just snapped that picture as I had a piece of walnut lying around and now I am thinking that would be a killer cutting board! The eye of the cutting board.

Thanks for reading and supporting Mineral Mondays in 2021. I hope I can bring even better stories and specimens to HIVE in 2022! Happy New Year and Rock on!



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