Wyoming's petrified forest EarthCache
Wyoming's petrified forest
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This area will take you back about 60 million years to the Early Eocene area when this was a shaded woodland with a lot of jungle like swamps.
Huge swamps filled the wide flat plain between the Big Horn Mountains and the Black hills. This ecosystem played an important part in the development of the coal in the area. Coal forms slowly over great periods of time. The coal beds in the area originally accumulated as peat deposits that formed from the leaves, branches, stems, roots and other vegatation that grew in the swamps. (Contemplate how much vegation it took to create the coal seams here that sometimes reach 200 feet thick and is commonly over 100 feet.) The peat beds were buried when a nearby river flooded covering the area with mud and sand. After millions of years under thousands of feet of sediment the peat gradually changed to coal.
The land where these petrified stumps now stand was much closer to sea level when the trees were alive. The trees were petrified by a gradual change in their chemical composition as they became buried and instead of decaying they become soaked with water which carried minerals into the trunks. The growth rings on the stumps suggest that they were between 800 and 1000 years old when buried. The rings closer to the center are larger than the outer ones suggesting that the climate was changing and becoming drier. The rainfall changed from about 50 inches then to about 12 inches now.
The trees were exposed gradually as erosion slowly removed the sand and rock that had buried them.
To log this cache email me the following:
1. How many in your party.
2. How tall were the trees?
3. What were the kind of trees here?
4. What are the three different names of the red rock found here?
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