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Product Description
Petrified Wood Unpolished Ribbon Wood Slab Yakima Washington
This small unpolished slab of Petrified Wood is From the Columbia Plateau Basalt Flow in the Yakima area of Washington and from the Miocene Epoch.
It is slabbed and 3.8 inches by 2 inches and .39 of an inch thick, and it is translucent in some areas!
It is an unusual Taxodioxylon found in flattened sections with nearly parallel growth rings and uniform, diamond-shaped agate inclusions. The local collectors called it “ribbon wood” because they thought the thin polished slices look like decorative ribbons. It is likely that the buried wood underwent considerable compression, causing the tracheid alignment to buckle into diamond-shaped voids that later infilled with chalcedony.
Yakima Canyon, Washington, is a scenic area along the Yakima River. The canyon walls reveal layers of ancient volcanic ash and petrified wood.
Approximately 17.5 million years ago during the middle of the Miocene epoch, a series of large volcanic eruptions began in the eastern part of the Columbia River Plateau, near the present-day borders of Washington, Oregon and Idaho. When conditions were right, some of these forests and swamps were buried by subsequent flows and the trees were preserved by silica dissolved from volcanic ash and the basalts. This happened several times during the 10 million years of volcanic eruptions, resulting in numerous deposits of fossilized wood across the Columbia Plateau.
More petrified hardwoods are found here and the rings, rays and pores are usually well preserved. The wood that came out of the canyon during the 60’s and 70’s is said to be some of the finest wood of all time when it comes to beauty, preservation, and taking a polish.
