Did you know...?
Did you know... that in the northern part of the province of Santa Cruz there are the remainings of a forest that got petrified -that is, was converted into stone- about 130
million years ago? If you ever travel as far south as to reach Santa Cruz arrange for a visit to the Petrifed forest natural monument. This historic area was protected in the year 1954. Today, the area
is rough without trees or natural life and is hard to believe that 150 million years ago this was populated by millions of trees. It has been estimated that during the JURASIC era this region had stable
climate and received beneficial humid winds from the Pacific given that Andes didn't exist at the time. There are traces of extremely large trees -from the family of the Araucarias- that flourished under
such circumstances. But around 130 million years ago seismic activity and the subsequent birth of the Andes ridge created a massive rain of ashes that covered the area completely. Researchers have no
doubt that the death of the trees was immediate as they have found small unopened petrified pines signaling a death period within 72 hours, the time it takes for them to open. The samples found in this
forest are the oldest ones in the planet. Some petrified trees are almost 35 mts in length and researchers have estimated their age to have been 1000 years old at the time of the cataclysm.
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