the.com/petrified wood
A tree that gave up growing and took up geology instead.
means Ancient wood that has been turned entirely to stone, its original plant tissue replaced molecule by molecule with minerals like quartz, so every ring and fiber survives in rock form.
from From Latin petra (rock/stone) plus facere (to make) — 'petrify' literally means 'to make into stone.' The word entered English use for this fossilization process as a natural extension of its older sense, 'to turn to stone with fear,' itself borrowed through French from that same Latin root for rock. The wood, buried in sediment and starved of oxygen, had groundwater carrying dissolved silica seep into its cells; over vast stretches of time the silica crystallized, replacing the organic material so faithfully that bark, grain, even insect damage can still be read in stone.
- process
- minerals replace wood cell by cell, keeping the grain
- timescale
- takes millions of years, buried before it can rot
- composition
- usually quartz, so technically it is now gemstone
- irony
- still flammable-looking, utterly fireproof in reality