For the Beauty of the Earth

Rali: When I was in sixth grade I wrote a paper about the Petrified Forrest. I have been secretly wishing to go there ever since.  Today was my lucky day! Several people we have met on our travels have told us that the Petrified Forest isn't worth it, so my hopes weren't very high. I knew that the trees don't stand on end like a forest. I also knew that the vast expanses that we have been traveling through would likely be in the Petrified Forest as well and the rockified trees would be far apart, and they were. Since we had been traveling through the Painted Desert for days and I knew that, in 1932, 53,000 acres of the Painted Desert were added to the Petrified Desert before it was made a national park in 1962 (by  President Dwight D. Eisenhower), I suspected that much of our time in the Petrified Forest national park would include time in the Painted Desert, and I was right. I knew that all the colors in the mountains were from different minerals and how much oxidation happened over years. Like rings in a tree, the painted desert reflects its age in the sediment, although some parts have been disturbed by the shifting of tectonic plates from the time of Pangea. What I didn't know was that this part of Arizona had been closer to the equator before the shifting of the continents. 

Despite my deep affection for rocks and trees and tree rocks, I could not recall how petrified trees were formed.  

I was reminded by the ranger and the video at the start that minerals including silica dissolved from volcanic ash and absorbed into the porous wood over hundreds and thousands and millions of years crystalizing and replacing the organic material of the trees with crystalized minerals over time. 

What sparked my imagination as a child did not disappoint today. I was reminded that this earth has been around for much longer than we have and will likely continue long after humans are gone. That may sound depressing to some, but to me, the idea that life is much more adaptive and perseverant than I am at times is a comfort.