Ginkgo Petrified Forest

we have petrified wood in the area in Central Washington we got loads of it not everybody has it there's whole states that don't have any petrified wood at all we've got quite a bit why and what does that petrified wood tell us about our history does it tell us that our climate was different by looking at the different kinds of trees that we have in that Petrified Forest can we reconstruct some details about Central Washington 15 million years ago who were the first people that were studying those logs is there anybody today studying those logs things like that tell you what let's start by doing this let's make a little quick sketch map and just try to get a few things on the board okay so this is going to be there's going to be crude this can be this me a sketch map all right that's the Columbia River this is a map now okay here's the Yakima River okay with me so far here is interstate 90 so we've got Ellensburg we've got vantage we've got Moses Lake okay got your bearings Yakima Washington Sunnyside a little town down here on this is the Columbia River Gorge all the way down here a little town of Roosevelt probably never heard of it down at the Columbia River Gorge okay where can I go find petrified logs where have people been looking for petrified logs over the last 100 years the obvious answer is that what is now ginkgo petrified forest State Park that's here right so this is going to be a treasure map let's let's put a bunch of X's so there's an X advantage that's an obvious place to find petrified logs they're loose on the ground but more commonly they are buried they are in the bedrock layers you've got to work to get these things out and it's not just logs its branches its twigs its cones occasionally it's leaf in the whole thing okay good so vantage is the obvious answer but there are more places than that I suppose the common visitor to Washington says oh yeah there's the side for the Petrified Wood State Park so that must be the only spot no no many of you know there's plenty of other places to find the wood where well we could go we'd go up on top of saddle mountain we can go just south of Othello or east of Mattawa that big beautiful ridge lots of petrified wood up there saddle mountains we can go in the Yakima River Canyon I'm tantum at the footbridge Petrified Wood they're further down in the canyon Yakima ridge petrified log there's petrified logs in this valley Kittitas Valley up in badger pocket southwestern excuse me southeastern corner of the valley beautiful petrified logs that were pull out of the menage - Ridge area what used to be called Creek a location Sunnyside outside of Sunnyside there's a gap Ridge near the rattlesnake kills good logs there and this place I mentioning down at the Columbia River Gorge near this little place called Roosevelt so I'm not just pulling these locations out of my head I have wood to share with you tonight petrified wood and some photos as well and the samples that have been donated to our department or that I have read about in these journals are over and over and over again coming from these locations that I just threw on the board you might have your favorite spot that's not but let's ticks that with these guys right here okay so we've got a lot of locations to find these petrified wood these petrified logs in the hills okay are they all from the same forest that's a decent question are all these logs from the same forest and are all the logs the same kind of wood you probably know the answer to that there's an incredible variety of species of trees of wood types in these petrified log collections and even at each of these X's there's a variety it's not like you got oak here and you got redwood here and you got ginkgo here it's an incredible variety and the ginkgo tree is a rarity so when you hear ginkgo Petrified Forest please don't think a dense forest of ginkgo trees that nobody's trying to peddle that there were some ginkgo logs found and they are prized but they are a minority in this collection of wood but we really want to work on is do we have one master layer of petrified wood that all these locations are coming from I don't know how you feel right now is that an obvious yes isn't it obvious no let's let that sit there for a second I'm going to get rid of the saddle now I'm going to move the saddle mountains let's do that I'm going to move I'm going to move this out of mountains there okay so now I'm going to do not a map what I'm going to do a cross-section I'm going to do a side view okay and introduce a couple of other concepts you're hearing me okay in the back there that's good to know pregnant pause here let's just so let's just just let the silence linger alright do you know that the bedrock layers pretty much dominating Eastern Washington are one kind of rock for the most part basalt bas alt high school students basalt lava lava flows one after another more than 300 lava flow stacked one on top of another generally more than two miles of basalt bottom to top and the petrified logs are coming from this stack of lavas now first off that's a surprise isn't it love is you know that's Hawaiian like lava coming in with incredible temperatures how could anything survive lava flows and we're pulling petrified logs out of the lava that's true the logs are coming right from the basalt lavas that's unusual we're not the only place in the world that has petrified wood you know that right there's Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona and get on the internet and you I just did this last night you find locations all over the world but it is pretty unusual to be pulling petrified wood out of basalt lava that is a rarity so we've got to come to terms with that and understand what that means for us but back to the story and the question we're trying to work on who remembers the question what's the question what's the main question we're trying to figure out but I'm good right perfectly set are all these logs coming from the same forest from the same time okay I'll cut to the chase no we have three buried forests and we've given them names the ginkgo Petrified Forest the title of this talk is one of these horizons that yields hundreds and hundreds of logs and they're coming from one lava flow and let me put a bunch of X's in here for that okay so X's are not only where we can find the treasure map where we can find the logs but we're going to have these X's be pulling these logs out of the gingko Petrified Forest let me let me put a capital G for that we have a date for that Petrified Forest when those trees were alive and just think of the concept here we're talking about a relatively lush dense forest in eastern Washington Eastern Washington is there a dense forest out advantage today there is not so that tells us about how things were different fifteen point five million years ago I just gave you the date back in the room you can't see that sorry fifteen and a half fifteen point five million years old for the ginkgo Petrified Forest and that's usually where things end in the discussion you go to the state park visitor center good stuff down there get that date okay there's one petrified forest most people that's kind of where we stopped but I like the idea that there's more than one there are two other major petrified forest layers maybe not quite as rich as the ginkgo Petrified Forest but there is a SM saddle mountains Petrified Forest layer so let's put some more X's here this is a forest that happened later younger you know geology right the layers at the bottom are the oldest and we're working away through geologic time so the saddle mountains flow saddle mountains Petrified Forest fourteen point seven million years old not that much younger real it's in the ballpark of 15.5 and there's one more just below the ginkgo another Petrified Forest later just below 15.5 best date we've got 15.8 the antenna you know that name the antenna and Petrified Forest layer so we've answered the question but I want to do more with it the question again was are all these logs coming from the same time long ago many of them are coming from the ginkgo Petrified Forest but some of these spots are from the saddle mountain horizon and some of these spots are from the antenna I wrote this lecture over the weekend I don't like looking at my notes but I got to here ok so obviously the ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park is the fifteen point five million year forest but we get to the top of Manoj - reg at that badger pocket location or the upper Creek or up one of the debris flows that Angie just from Andy just reported before we started talking some of those slides that came down last summer do you remember there was a little bit of stuff coming down on the canyon road going down the Yakima River Canyon there's some at least one newly exposed log up that draw so that's a little tip I stole your Thunder Andy maybe that was your story in a few minutes okay great even at the Yakima Ridge we've got our ginkgo horizon more coming on that but let's finish our work where are the saddle mountain logs coming from the obvious answer is the saddle mountains yes but logs coming from the Sunnyside gap and many of the logs down in the Columbia River Gorge at Roosevelt are coming from that horizon older logs excuse me younger law just a little bit younger than our ginkgo if we go in the Yakima River Canyon by the way that's the topic next week if you want to come back we're talking about not petrified wood but talking about the formation of the Yakima River Canyon as a whole and some other things tied to it I'm tanum I'm Tana okay kind of interesting let me throw one more at you before we get rid of this let's think about the elevation of these locations the elevation how many feet above sea level for each of these spots I did these down quickly Vantage's roughly I'm anything to write them down that's going to be too complicated then is that 700 feet above sea level top of Menashe test 2,500 feet top of yakima ridge which is where we also have gingko logs 4,000 feet above sea level less than a thousand 2500 feet 4,000 feet above sea level but I thought they're all from the same horizon how's that possible to have all these different elevations with these logs when we're saying they're all from the same horizon what's the answer yes the layers are not flat anymore in some places the layers are nice and flat but in many places including through this region we have intense complications with the geometry of these layers a basic law in geology says rock layers are originally horizontal they're created flat and for the most part this is true we did have a nice stack with everybody nice and flat like in the Grand Canyon but since that time over the last 10 million years or so there has been squeezing plate tectonic compression just a mess and we'll said something else to mess with those horizontal layers and I want to draw what that looks like for you in a second but I want to give you a few more ideas about how you can find these layers they're like old friends find these layers at radically different elevation and have you tried to mentally figure how that's possible before I try to draw a couple things for instance the main sediment horizon advantage is called the Vantage sediment we're going to talk about the Vantage sediment is right beneath the gingko Petrified Forest it's a it's a light tan colored layer an advantage again we're below a thousand feet elevation that same Vantage sediment horizon is at the top of Menashe cache Ridge twenty-five hundred feet above sea level as you drive i-80 to to Yakima as you go through the cut at the top of Menashe - can you in your mind see a light colored layer it's almost vertical it's not even flat it's been flat and tipped that's the idea we're talking about I'll give you one more the top of saddle mountain is 2,500 feet 2,600 feet above sea level same guys down here are less than 400 feet elevation same idea we need to warp and even break these originally flat layers to get that kind of geometry so let me give you a just a couple of made-up examples of that you know I teach geology of Washington every morning at 10 o'clock at campus and it's usually a bunch of 19-year olds that would like to be somewhere else this is a luxury to have you all super attentive I was going somewhere with that but I can't remember what it was okay let me give you an idea then of what we're talking about with folding and faulting and this will come in this will be helpful to us next week if you come back if you're able to come back with the formation of the Yakima River Canyon okay great so remember we've got our flat layers that were created with one eruption after another good now a nice simple concept a cartoonish concept to explain the three main ridges between Ellensburg and Yakima you take the freeway you go over three ridges right a nice simple concept is that those originally flat line layers have been warped they've been squeezed they have warped and where they walked up it's an anticline and we have menage - Ridge or Northam tandem Ridge or Southam tandem wrench and where they walk down we have simc lines basins between those uplifted regions that's a nice cartoonish idea why do we care about that tonight well remember now our logs right our three horizons are getting caught up in that pattern and so now here we've got our logs advantage oh and our logs up on Menashe - oh and our logs down at Rosa but it's more complicated than that we're experienced in geology most of us we're ready to handle something more closer to the truth than this and Bentley and Powell a few others spent a whole career mapping the details of these ridges and they found faults not only folds but they found faults so let me try to just give you a simple picture of how a major fault that produces yes earthquakes that's a topic for another day how we can get our petrified logs higher than their brothers and sisters if we compress and not fold but if we compress and for fault here's our logs here's our logs and we have taken half of the birthday cake and we have broken it from the rest of the cake and with each magnitude 7 earthquake we've shoved this thing up this fault ramp 10 feet 20 feet 15 feet every time we have a big earthquake and we do have excellent exposures of faults like this between here and Yakima if you really want the truth and I'm not as gifted as I could be with drawing right now on the spot we've combined both of these we'd have full fault folding and we'd have faulting all at the same time to create a very complicated picture but you get the idea if you have the skills to visualize in three dimension you can find our petrified log layers three of them there's some minor layers by the way as well but there's the three major ones that are cropping up at all these places in Central Washington there is a unifying theme it's like you can connect the dots between these locations if you can visualize these stack of basalt lavas we're good okay I'm not done yet with the chalkboard but I'm getting close about five more minutes of this and then it's story time that's where you come in all right let's take one of these basalt flows now we know that there's more than 300 let's just take one and familiarize ourself with a couple of specific features that are going to help us understand how this petrification takes place you might be surprised we're talking about petrified wood tonight I haven't talked about the logs yet and how we actually make them turn into stone and when did that happen how long does that take I'm going to let the video and some of the slides tell some of the story but let's try a little bit here so now we're down to one flow average thickness of one flow one basalt lava flow 100 feet 100 feet one flow traveling some of the Grande Ronde flows 300 miles so first of all that's just a mind-blower right how do you take a hundred feet of molten lava and keep it molten a 300 miles to cross the state that's a whole other discussion there's models to explain that but that's that's the scale of what we're talking about and our petrified wood is part of that story all right great so here's one flow coming in here's our six-foot person okay it's 1,200 degrees it's super hot it's orange it's like Hawaiian lava almost always forming at the top of this cooling basalt lava flow are gas bubbles that are going to get trapped in the cooling lava so it's like a big Stein a beautiful beer with all these bubbles rising to the top and getting out before you drink it that's what's going on in a beautiful lava flow there's lots of gases that are frantically trying to scream to the top get out into the atmosphere and escape this cooling love well this is a sad story these guys don't quite make it all right they get trapped the gas bubbles these are called vesicles so a vesicular top or vesicles are commonly found at the top of each of these floats we don't care about those four petrified wood we'll talk a lot about columns next week because there's beautiful columns exposed in the Yakima River Canyon those columns form in these basalts typically from the bottom up I should have drawn the other way that's next week let's not worry about those either but the third major feature we do want to pause with pillows have you heard about these pillows sometimes not always sometimes form at the base of these monster basalt flows sometimes like if I still had my stack of 300 I'd only put pillows in you know a handful 20 25 of them out of the 300 I'm guessing now okay the pillows are circles they're dark colored circles whoa but a pillow hanging out into space here dark colored circles they're big I mean they're not these little tiny Swiss cheese looking holes I mean they're the size of basketballs they're dark colored and around each of these dark circles is kind of an orangish greenish crumbly weird-looking background but I would like to make sure that you realize we're pulling our logs remember we said the petrified logs are coming right out of the lava flow which is hard to can't conceptualize the logs are not coming out of the middle of the flow certainly the logs would have burned up if they're in the middle of a 100 foot thick section of super hot lava the logs remember there are X's right the logs are being pulled out of the pillow zone just down here at the base logs right out of the pillow zone I'm trying to get you curious about what the pillows are telling us about the environment then maybe you can already deduce a couple of things but I want to tease you just a little bit so no X's here in the middle no X's here at the top only X is down here in the pillow zone because something is protecting those logs and the pillows are telling us about what is protecting those logs but I'm not exaggerating now you've got one flow with let's say 27 X's and we might have a dozen different kinds of wood coming out of one lava flow at one location and I'm talking about cypress wood right next to redwood right next to ginkgo right next to oak red next to Elm now what is going on why do we have this crazy variety of wood coming from one little spot maybe the width of this stage where you can pull these logs out of this basalt flow we're still working on that but there's some models and that's the last thing I want to do on the chalkboard here right below the gingko Petrified Forest layer or the saddle mountain or the antennae I got throwing chalk again you know is that sediment if this is the gingko forest if this is the one of the three layers that we're talking about the Vantage sediment is a 20 foot thick section of sediment below this base of this gingko lava flow there is work right now being done by some people in this audience with the details of this Vantage sediment and part of the reason for really revisiting the details of this Vantage sediment and these other sedimentary horizons by the way are this maybe if we can interpret these sedimentary units differently it can help us explain why we've got this crazy variety can you think of a place where a cypress tree grows next to a spruce tree grows right next to a redwood tree grows right next to a ginkgo tree I'm not an arborist but I can't and most of these logs look like they have been transported they're beaten they don't have lots of limbs coming off fragile they've they've been they've been worked and yes they're petrified they're 15 million years old but they looks like they've been transported here's the punchline in the old days in George Beck's time this sediment was viewed as a lake sediment and there was a lake that protected the logs more evidence for that coming in a second current geologists working on this issue are revisiting the Vantage and thinking there may be flows their baby movement recorded in this this is not just a layer of sand these are volcanic mudflows perhaps these are debris flows in fact some of the latest work indicates that there are repeated units within this Vantage horizon that indicate that there are flows of maybe more than 10 miles maybe up to 50 or 60 miles now why do we care about that what's the connection to petrified wood if you're doing the math maybe we got it the working model is we've got this crazy variety of wood in Vantage let's say because these trees were brought from different places different locations up in the foothills of the Cascades and these individual pulses of flow coming from the Cascades are bringing these logs to Central Washington so here's one of the biggest messages I have for you from tonight you go to Vantage you see all these trees preserved in stone probably wasn't the forest right there probably was a collection of trees from different elevations up in the Cascades that were swept down by the volcanic mudflows and brought to this location and then dealt with with the ginkgo lava flow so this is the latest attempt to work out the details of the story a generation two generations ago it was detailing all this crazy variety in the wood now we're trying to work with the model of these horizons it's more than the vantage sediment on that stack of 300 lava flows oftentimes there are little sedimentary deposits between eruptions of lava so here's the way to view that we've got 300 lava flows that's fine oh is the first one Monday and the second one is Tuesday and these lava flows are coming in every day no our interpretation is because of these sedimentary packages between the lavas there's thousands of years of nothing before the next eruption comes thousands of years of quiet thousands of years of developing an ecosystem with plants and animals and streams and lakes and then the next basalt lava comes in Barry's everybody kills damn near everything preserves only a few of the trees in the pillow zone but basically wipes the place flat of biology but then you've got another few thousand maybe tens of thousands of quiet time to establish another ecosystem that's why we have this repetitive story of different levels of Petrified Forest those ecosystems wouldn't give up lava flow wipe the place flat we got time to establish something new okay let's get right into this let's keep the momentum going and add visuals now to what we tried to establish and I'll go through these quickly and we'll get to a variety of concepts that hopefully will work for you so yes you can go to the state park today you can visit some of these logs young people in the room take your family down there and enjoy these beautiful logs that are on display you can go to the museum itself there's a museum set right on the perch overlooking the Columbia River there's also a trail of logs that are still in those basaltic layers here's an old photo if you only know the vantage area since the 1960s this looks foreign to you but here's our visitor center in our museum and we're looking south towards Sentinel gap and here's the floodplain of the mighty Columbia now underwater of course with the construction of the water pump Dam and it was back in the 1930s most of you know that the CCC was involved to create that State Park but there's a tie to the University here then a college and this gentleman here was the center of all of it George Beck his teaching career at Central from the mid 1920s to 1959 and he was a well versed person he was a musician played his cello sometimes in the teaching lab and was involved in teaching music on campus and was in community music organizations as well but his other passion was petrified wood and he had a long history of being the resident expert of petrified wood in Central Washington and he was the main guy the main guy to actually get this state park going and to convince people to protect these logs to actually get some preservation so today some of the beautiful logs are out there in the State Park it is illegal to pick up petrified wood it's illegal to mess with it much at all and George was the guy to get that rolling and thankfully that's here for all of us to enjoy for generations to come this is some of his early work George Beck I'm talking about now back in the early 1930s when he first started going out there getting some tips from some locals and starting to painstakingly go through these different logs to identify them to take good notes and to ultimately come up with what I was giving you earlier tonight about our different layers and our different times this is one of the logs that was beautifully preserved and and photographed by Asheville Curtis you know that name from lots of photography in the early days of Washington so I like putting these lectures together for a number of reasons including forcing myself to go through my file cabinets and I went through a bunch of stuff I had collected over the years and I found this journal a copy of a journal that George Beck kept if you can't read that from the back this is a geology journal by George back from March 1st 1933 to April 5th 1936 so it's recording his daily excursions out to the Vantage area lots of it handwritten he was a sketcher he was a handwritten guy I'm going to read just a little bit of this to you a August 28th 1934 back Ted Frechette John Whitney and a few others down to the Columbia River north of the frenchmen mountains we started at five o'clock Friday morning this is August now going into in Ted's truck in my car with supplies for a five-day stay we went a byway of guide sucks place at the mouth of Park Creek and drove on in by way of the Koala mean to the Osborne ranch the first day afternoon we rested it was awfully hot and hunted for water cook came in in the afternoon and helped us open the pipe on the hillside that fed water to the house it goes on and on but it's a very personal narrative it's almost a personal journal as well as recording the geology and he mentions Ted first Frechette Ted was Beck's right-hand man as I understand it Ted was involved in some of the teaching here at Central with Beck but more importantly Ted was a young guy and eager guy and he was installed as the main man to oversee the construction of the State Park and be involved with the CCC that's that same log again by the way this is a photo from 1934 1935 a quick personal letter from back to Ted dear Ted I called wiegel who's the state park superintendent at his home right after we hung up and asked him about the situation blah blah blah blah blah I'm tickled where is that I think I tickles me pink to see you get a good job out of it I told Wiegel I thought you had it coming and I do think so too so between Becca and Frechette there were great plans to establish this beautiful State Park telegram as well this is all from the Frechette family Ted's son Jim lives in Ellensburg now and has posted a lot of this on a website I can send you the link if you like tomorrow when I recap this lecture and there was a nice little article in the Ellensburg paper a couple of years ago about Jim who's now an old man reflecting on his dad Ted there's tragedy involved here Ted died suddenly in 1935 long before much of this was constructed it was a short illness and and and Jim was it was a baby at the time so Beck continued on without Ted's help but they eventually got this thing established and we all see it now and we enjoy it so yes grand opening or some sort of event here with all these beautiful cars from the old days you've been to this place perhaps where the trees are caged in the hillside take the height on a nice hot afternoon in August when so archival photos of visitors who are still stopping and visiting well here we go our logs coming right out of the basalt seems impossible to believe but if we pause and really address these pillows I think we can feel a little bit better about why these petrified logs are coming out of this lava so these are the pillows in living color dark circles this is a cowboy hat for scale dark circles with our oranges greenish crumbly stuff around the outside and here's a detail two different pillows and some of this oranges greenish material and some car keys for scale for many many years this is what I use to teach my students about pillows onward we go so the next time you drive on the old Vantage highway maybe you knew that already if you didn't here's a beautiful set of pillows on top of a sedimentary bed I'm not saying there's logs right there but there are places where logs have been pulled right out of the pillow zone rot in interstate 90 as you climb from Vantage heading up to ryegrass climb from Vantage up to ryegrass you're heading west keep your eyes on the road have somebody next door or a shotgun look for these holes occasionally some of these photos from Jack Powell so the logs are pulled out there now on the ground at the Museum for the visitors to enjoy but quite often those logs are coming right out of the pillows on another shot right get this sense where that is so you're maybe still wondering why the logs didn't burn up we're still in the lava so we got a little bit more work to do there a little idea of the variety of the wood I've already made this point but you can look at the literature and realize that the the list is endless just crazy crazy variety and the idea then is that if we are involving these lahars if we are involving this transportation agent getting all these logs together we maybe did have a lake in the vantage area with logs in the water again the waters present the logs are present but they all aren't right there in a forest right there advantage that's the idea another nice cartoon from powell talking about our lava flow coming in preserving somehow these logs that's the other two-minute clip to try to help you answer that question here's our Vantage sediment and an older Columbia River basalt below that the preservation is absolutely staggering and if you haven't seen any of these pieces up close please go down to the state park tomorrow or I've got some polished slabs up here on the stage that you're welcome to come up and look at after we're done and that's just a few minutes from now by the way I've also got some other archival material that I'd like to share with you as well back to back then so we'll sprinkle in more of his journal stuff maybe from the back of the room this is hard to see but Becca's understanding that we have this folding back understands that the layers are not flat and that it helps us understand how we can tie these Petrified Wood locations together and Beck is doing what I did on the chalkboard I'm just copying him right he's got all of his basalt lava flows he's taking notes as to which horizons are yielding wood which are yielding leaves which are yielding fossils of critters not very many that lava was so destructive that there was hardly any vertebrate fossils recorded also pretty light here but a detailed hand-drawn sketch of the area north avantage north is to the bottom here but basically out in the State Park that is now preserved by the park and Beck was starting to wonder about this crazy variety and he was trying to draw uplands and somehow get that material down I'm not sure he was thinking lahars though he didn't have the benefit of seeing what happened with Mount st. Helens and you know what that lahar look like right you pictured the turtle River Valley in 1980 and this big slurry of mud it wasn't really mud though right it was rock and ash and Bree and water with the strength of liquid concrete that's what we're talking about coming out of the Highlands and delivering these logs and picking them up as they go this is one short clip from trees of stone a short film that's been shown you know every hour on the hour for years at the Museum a la short little clip from it to the west the Cascade Mountains stood much lower than they do today moisture from the Pacific Ocean crossed over the Cascades easily the climate was warm and humid the plantlife thick and lush swamp trees flourished along the wet edges of lowland lakes and rivers while broadleaf forests and cone-bearing trees covered the higher hills strange prehistoric animals made their home here to squat short legged rhinoceroses some of you know there actually is a mold of a rhino from this time on the way up to dry falls at Blue Lake so this is an old publication in 1950s here's our friend George back taking central students out to the Blue Lake Rhino here he is kind of sitting here dressed in his tie and his white shirt and having the students go one by one up the ladder to check that out so that is real the Blue Lake Rhino is part of the story I love this photo he's like you don't understand I'm from Renton I don't I don't belong here so I keep going back to his journal and I think the timing is such that his journalist at least this journal is from the early 30s when he was really going full guns going great guns with developing the park and going through these logs I'm not sure he had that momentum going through his whole career and we'll see how he transitioned in some other half efforts here's how we get some of the detail of the actual wood types you can actually just take a cut of a log you can use a regular handheld camera zoom in real tight on one of these polished slabs for instance and take a pattern of the structure of the cells this is out of my area but you can compare these cell patterns with living trees and it's a it's an open-and-shut case you can make beautiful cases for the types of wood that are present also from trees of stones whistlin quartz may take millions of years laboratory research suggests that after the silica enters the wood it bonds itself to cell walls first and then fills the space inside them gradually the grain of the wood is recreated in stone the best examples of petrified wood like these uncovered advantage show every growth ring in resin duct every crack and tiny detail of the original wood the tissue structure is so well preserved at several million years later professor Beck was able to tell what types of ancient trees had been trapped in the lava flow the ginkgo leaves are part of the story and they were the prized possession that Beck was looking for another clip short at least six thousand years ago humans in Central Washington were fashioning blades and weapon points from stone that was glassy and hard as Flint but looked like the wood of a tree when professor Beck and his students unearthed the Petrified Forest they were actually hunting for one specific type of petrified wood fossil leaf prints of a gingko tree had been found in nearby Grand Coulee but the fossilized wood of the gingko had never been found by anyone anywhere in the world the stately gingko with leaves like fluttering paper fans is one of the oldest most primitive trees still growing on the earth 200 million years ago during the time of the dinosaurs ginkgo trees flourished in temperate regions all around the globe another classic old photo from a place on the northern edge of Ginkgo State Park where one of these logs is actually standing some dogs here in the shade I don't I don't have a date here for the photo but it's pretty sweet the slabs I have up here were donated to the geology department here at Central from Audie Turner and his wife they ran a rock shop in Yakima and Turner was one of Beck's hunting buddies hunting for petrified wood there was a number these amateur guys were totally into it I suppose odd he's not an amateur he ran a rock shop but he's we've got more than 200 of these polished slabs many of them on display in Lindh Hall where our geology building is located and also in that display are more treasure maps on where to find these logs and where Turner was collecting his work this is in a publication called gems and minerals this is uh here's the footbridge at UM tanum so we're in that um tenem Petrified Forest layer Audis handwritten notes about his locations another publication by fellow named Jackson more treasure maps for people this is outside of the state park boundary advantage this is a little way to get to the logs up at saddle mountain so this is not just a couple of people as you heard from Chuck and others there's a whole generation of people who really were just obsessed with this petrified wood business and there was tremendous amounts of collecting and trading and everything else so this is one of our last photos do you recognize it Jack Paul was talking about it during his little story this is a photo taken by the late Marty Katz taken in 1970 as interstate 82 was being put across minest ash ridge cut into the ridge here's our Vantage sediment used to be flat now almost vertical this is the unit then that Bentley and others are reinterpreting as a dozen a dozen separate little debris flows that are carrying material instead of just settling out the bottom of a lake so you get confirmation then what's going on few more here's a cartoon Beck must have been beloved he's got students making cartoons of him he's got political cartoons and other things about going out and collecting and this is a twist I was surprised to find somehow our department got a bunch of letters that were sent to Joe Dobie in Yakima and the letters were from the fossil woods of the far west group that was back Beck was handwriting newsletters and drawing Earth cross-sections of his cell identifications and for a small charge was sending photographs from through his microscope and was sending to these people who had this amateur interest I presume but by god he had his own letterhead for goodness sake so whether it was just truly public outreach or whether it was some other kind of approach that was part of Beck especially later on this is another one of his kind of hand-drawn newsletters back in the early 1940s just spreading the word just helping people understand about all these logs and I've got some of those letters with me that Joe Dobie letters if you want to see them up close yes Beck did some official publications as well but for the most part he stayed local there is a guy though an amateur taw a tad dil Hoff who lives now in Issaquah who has been very into petrified wood and has been linking up with geologists and formally studying the woods of the ginkgo horizon and Tad's a wonderful fellow has been a good friend to our department and I'm happy to report then that there are people still working on this this is not just Beck and his cronies 70 years ago and nobody working on it today so there's still his work being done in fact tad has a website called evolving Earth org which is he and his brother supporting student work and also trying to just continue the work of Beck and others a generation or two ago couple finals that after Beck retired in 1959 he returned to Yakima was heavily involved in the yeah commune is iam this is from 1965 the last thing I was able to find 1979 the dedication of the George Beck marker which you maybe don't know about but I think you do you recognize this you driving down the yakima canyon and there's a brown sign a heritage marker up ahead that was dedicated to george beck and if you stop I mean the tourists stop but if you stop you can read a little bio on George Beck kind of weird it's in the canyon instead of down advantage but anyway it's there and there is a living monument to George and his work so here's the star of the show George Beck the Petrified Wood is the star of the show and I'm hoping that you feel like you have a better feeling for all of these buried forests in Central Washington thank you for coming out tonight I appreciate it you

Channel: Central Washington University

Views: 83,172

Rating: 4.9285202 out of 5

Keywords: Central Washington University Organization, Ellensburg Citytownvillage, Geology (Field Of Study), History, Flood, cwu geology, Central Washingtion University, Geology, nick zentner, petrified wood, cwu geological sciences, Earthquake, Cwu, Ice Age Floods, Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park (Location), George Beck

Id: nfbMxrPnYcc

Length: 50min 21sec (3021 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 27 2013